Q&A: Lucas Wrench of OK #1 | The-voice | tulsapeople.com – tulsapeople.com

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Tulsa artist, curator and new DJLucas Wrench has been exploring local and worldwide streaming radio after COVID-19 disrupted his original idea for his space, OK #1. Check below to find 91.1 FM's full schedule. We touched base with Wrench to see how his exploration into radio has been, what is next for his space and much more.

Tell me about OK No.1 in general, what is it?OK #1 is an art space/ community space/ storefront on Route 66 between Yale and Sheridan which opened last September. The goal is to host projects that wouldnt otherwise exist in Tulsa, which leaves it pretty open ended. Tulsa has music venues and some art galleries, so OK #1 is there for activities in the 'other' category. With COVID-19 all the public events transitioned online, and the storefronts become a space for groups that need physical space to meet and organize. The Socialist Rifle Association used it at the start of the pandemic as a warehouse to distribute emergency supplies, street medic groups have been using it as a meeting and training space, and now its also HQ for the radio station.

Tell me about the radio station! Where did that idea come from? What difficulties have you faced while trying to create it?The project started when a friend gave me an enormous H.A.M. radio antenna thatd been sitting in their backyard. I didnt know very much about radio, so I assumed if I had a huge antenna it wouldnt be very hard to start a pirate radio station. It eventually turned out that the antenna wasnt the right kind, and everything had to be done from scratch, but by then I was too far gone.

More broadly, COVID-19 necessitates thinking of new ways to present work, and radio is tried and true. KCHUNG is a community-run pirate radio station in LA I was inspired by, and other cities have similar projects. Especially now that music venues are shut down, it seemed like thered be a lot of interest in that kind of community radio model here in Tulsa.

Im hoping to get to the point where the station can run on its own, and OK #1 is just providing the space. I dont want to be determining the content or schedule or who gets a show. The idea is its open to anyone who wants to participate.

What plays on the radio station and where can people hear it?Anything the DJs want to play! We broadcast on 91.1 FM, with a range of about two miles from the storefront, but it varies with the weather and elevation and all that. East of the space is downhill so it reaches further. Its also streaming online worldwide at okno.one. Were at the point where theres at least one show a day, and lots more are on the way. Theres no official calendar yet but heres the schedule so far:

Travis Mammedatys Red Road Show on Sundays at 4 p.m.

Bad Ground is Sunday at 7 p.m.

DJ No Name is on Mondays at 9:18 p.m.

Lars Gardner and Noah Beal have a show Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m.

Wednesdays we have Elisa Harkins Mvhayv Radio at 5 p.m., Olivia Woodall on at 7 p.m., and Natty Gray on at 8 p.m.

Thursday afternoon from 1-3 p.m. is Food Stamps and Drink Tickets with Kris Rose.

Nathan Young who runs Tulsa Noise is doing a Friday night show at 7 p.m., and DJ $ir Mike is on at 10 p.m.

The worst show by far is my Saturday afternoon talk show where I mostly ramble aimlessly for an hour, and then we have Ghoulies Mansion on Saturday night at 8 p.m.

What else is coming in the future from OK No.1?In September were hosting a video lecture called Obedient x3 by Zach Blas, exploring the bizarre mix of ideologies and influences that shape Silicon Valley and the tech industry more broadly. Its part of a trilogy of queer science fiction Zachs been working on. The last one imagined Ayn Rand on an acid trip encountering the dystopian future of the Internet, this one will get into the Doors and The Lizard King, nootropics, queer utopias, witchcraft, and more!

And then Crystal Campbell and I are working on a series for the end of the year with a group of artists doing really interesting work around archives and archival practices. But lots more schemes on the way. Stay tuned.

Anything else you want to add?Please dont report us to the FCC and please host a show! Its open to all, just get in touch. Also if anyone wants to send us $500, itd let us upgrade the transmitter to get full Tulsa-wide coverage. PayPal.me/OKno1

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Q&A: Lucas Wrench of OK #1 | The-voice | tulsapeople.com - tulsapeople.com

Is Ethereum left and Bitcoin right? Cointelegraph Magazine – Cointelegraph

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Hacktivist Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki took aim at Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Twitter recently for essentially writing off smart contracts inventor Nick Szabo as a right-wing crank.

Taaki wrote that this sort of attitude was typical of an Eth[ereum] culture which is about sparkling burner parties, privileged digital nomads, microdosing LSD, sex orgies and social-justice / vague doing-good.

Pretty much everyone had the same initial thought: Why arent I getting invited to these parties?

But Taakis comments also highlighted the political divisions between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Is it really as simple as Bitcoiners lean to the right and Ethereans lean to the left?

You can make up your own mind about Nick Szabos views, thanks to this obsessively curated list of his tweets. Buterin characterizes Szabos utterances as bad faith arguing and incholate yelling. He appears to regret naming a denomination of Ethereum after Szabo.

But Taaki, who is British-Iranian, took exception to white-leftypol Ethereans canceling Szabo because he doesnt fit their worldview and wrote in a tweet that they reminded him of white left (fake socialists) on an anti-rascist crusade.

Its neo-colonialist white saviour attitude, he wrote. Eth is exactly this.

To be fair, Ether isnt exactly like that, but there are definitely some elements that might lead you to draw that conclusion. To take one example, the man sometimes referred to as Ethereums chief economic thinker is self-proclaimed social liberal radical Glen Weyl, who founded RadicalxChange. Thats the sort of progressive, nonprofit outfit that thinks the No. 1 most crucial thing to inform new visitors to its website is not what it actually does some sort of think-tank stuff? but that it stands with the social justice movements Black Lives Matters and Global Pride. Buterin is a big fan of Weyls and sits on the board of RadicalxChange. The pair have held lengthy email exchanges about his societal engineering ideas, which include imposing a tax to penalize using standard white English or taxing masculinity to subsidize femininity. A proponent of a Universal Basic Income and quadratic voting, Weyl gave a speech at Ethereums DevCon that he described as a rally cry against extreme individualism and capitalism. At its conclusion, he explicitly asked for questions from women and minority groups first. Of course, Ethereum conferences are just as full of nerdy white men as the rest of crypto, but at least the first guy to ask a question had the good grace to apologize for that fact.

Try that kind of left-wing malarky at a meet-up for hardcore Bitcoiners, though, and you could bring a firestorm down on your head, as the author of Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies, Andreas M. Antonopolous, found out when he asked his audience for a few suggestions of podcasts he could appear on that werent the stereotypical white, male, finance-focused podcasters he talks to endlessly, as he wanted to reach out to a broader audience.

This seemingly innocuous request outraged his fanbase (which may have some crossover with the Gamergate crowd) and caused a Twitter storm, with users complaining about how Bitcoin doesnt care about identity politics and getting their noses out of joint at his outrageous rejection of meritocracy by trying to chat to some different people. Even Bitcoin icon Hodlonaut questioned his focus on race and gender.

Antonopolous was unrepentant. I will not apologize for being an SJW, he wrote, characterizing the backlash as: A lot of whining because I didnt allow the implicit bias to drive 90% of my podcast interviews but only 75-80%. Oh the horror.

Bitcoiners and Ethereans clearly have differences, which is why Crypto Twitter is beset with largely pointless debates about supply gate and pre-mined coin scams. When Peter McCormack, the host of What Bitcoin Did, asked his followers What is BTC v ETH really about? influencer American Hodl summed it up as: Liberals do Ethereum and Conservatives do Bitcoin.

Its not quite that simple of course: Plenty of left-wing people are into Bitcoin, and plenty of right-wing people like Ether. Even Weyl cant be easily boxed into the left or the right, as he somehow manages to combine his love of socialism with a love of right-wing libertarian hero Ayn Rand. As Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver told Cointelegraph Magazine: Both camps are so big now that there are people from every political persuasion involved now.And politics understandably comes a distant second when theres money to be made. As DeFi influencer Degen Spartan said when explaining that hes not a Bitcoin maximalist or an Ethereum maximalist: Im a profit Maxi.

But still, there is a widespread perception that those with conservative or right-wing ideas are more drawn to Bitcoin and those of a more progressive bent support Team Ethereum. A CoinDesk survey of 1,200 crypto users in 2018 lent weight to this idea, finding that 55% of Ethereans tended left, while 55% of Bitcoiners tended Right. A further 3% of Bitcoiners claimed to be nihilists, which may explain all those Pepe the Frog crypto edgelords on 4chan.

(As an interesting aside, the more hard currency focused the coin, the more right wing, with Monero coming in at 57% right wing, Bitcoin Cash (63%) and Litecoin (69%). The DASH guys must have cupboards full of MAGA hats and Tiki Torches because 78% of them are on the right.)

Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan says there are philosophical differences between the two leading cryptocurrency projects that help explain these tendencies.

It makes sense given the nature of what the coins do, he said. I would assume that most people that are into Bitcoin are people who advocate for less government intervention and especially less government intervention in money simply because thats what Bitcoin was built for.

As far as Ethereum is concerned, that has many more practical applications that dont necessarily have to do with governments or banking or even finance in general. It appeals to anyone whos into technology.

Greenspan cautions that hes not basing his views on hard data but says that from what hes observed: People who prefer Bitcoin are the type of people who are kind of set in their ways, or that are of a strong mind. Whereas people who use Ethereum and other altcoins are generally going to be more people who are more open to new ideas.

Professor David Golumbia is the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. In the polemic, he argues that not only was Bitcoin borne out of the right-wing libertarian culture of the cypherpunks but that the technology itself is inherently right wing.

Theres little doubt that key figures in Bitcoins prehistory such as Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May and John Gilmore were staunch libertarians. They opposed big government and taxation and worried about privacy, the rise of the surveillance state and freedom of speech.

Golumbia says the ideas of right-wing Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, who coined the political philosophy anarcho-capitalism, were also very influential to Bitcoins early days. That extremely libertarian form of politics that advocates for the elimination of centralized states in favor of self-ownership, private property and laissez-faire style free markets obviously will sound familiar to anyone who has been around Bitcoiners.

It was born out of anarcho-capitalism, Golumbia says of Bitcoin. Rothbard has these ideas that there is a single thing called the State whose only point of existence is to enslave people. The only free individual is somebody who is free of government. And these people believed and they still believe that it was possible to use encryption technology to hide oneself from the state.

In Golumbias view, Bitcoin was designed to become the currency of this new realm, money outside of the control of the state. (Golumbias theory runs into trouble attributing this political ideology to Satoshi Nakamoto directly, and he barely mentions him in our hour-long chat.)

Needless to say, Golumbia is not a fan of the whole culture. He calls May the author of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto a pretty racist, sexist, very disturbing guy and paints a portrait of the cypherpunk mailing list as a sort of alt-right techie version of the Tea Party.

It is really loud and vicious when you read it, full of hate directed at a lot of people. It intersects with a lot of other anti-government movements we have in the world, he said.

Needless to say, this view is highly contested. McCormack called it insulting when I described it to him.

They were certainly paranoid, and I think legitimately paranoid, said McCormack. But I wouldnt say right wing at all. I would almost imagine a lot of them apolitical. They just wanted to build a better world.

I consider them a group of freedom fighters who recognize the overreach of the state, the risks associated with lack of privacy, increases in surveillance, and abuse of the money system by corrupt politicians. They wanted to build tools and technologies to free themselves.

I think if anything, theyre a group of fucking heroes.

Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver said that when he got involved in 2011, the early Bitcoiners were all libertarians with a strong belief in free markets. He doesnt see such views as right wing. Just read about the thoughts of early Bitcoiners like myself, Ross Ulbricht, Gavin Andresen, and others, he said. We were all libertarians, not conservatives or right-wingers.

Voluntaryism which is an offshoot of anarcho-capitalism was what motivated me and others to get involved and promote Bitcoin early on.

Bitcoin was made up and promoted by a bunch of anarcho-capitalists originally. Later, its development community was taken over by a bunch of blue-haired San Francisco leftists types. Most of the AnCaps have moved on to coins like BCH, or ETH.

Kain Warwick, the founder of Ethereum-based DeFi protocol Synthetix, said that no one involved in the early days of Bitcoin could correctly be called a conservative.

You couldnt be a conservative in the sense of trying to maintain the status quo in the legacy financial system. You had to see some problem that you thought needed to be solved in order for Bitcoin to make sense to you, he said.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, those blue-haired leftists were gaining numbers. Buterin describes two strands of political thought growing together in Bitcoins early days. In the crypto space, as early as in 2010 or 2012, there were a lot of people interested in libertarianism, and a lot of people interested in socialism, Buterin said. There was this kind of idealistic energy.

While the two strands can be reconciled, Ethereans approach to rapid technological progress and evolving codebases is much more difficult to reconcile with Bitcoiners who are invested in protecting the fundamental properties of Bitcoin. successfully merge. As Bitcoins ideology around hard money, fixed supply, decentralization and security became stronger, the Bitcoin community became more resistant to changes to its fundamental properties. Something Ver discovered during the damaging block size debate that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Magazine co-founder Buterin also ran up against an unwillingness to experiment when he argued in 2013 that Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. When he failed to get support, he launched Ethereum in January 2014.

Viewed this way, the BitcoinEthereum battle is not so much Left vs. Right, but Progress vs. Stability. If, as Warwick said, no one in the early days of Bitcoin could be conservatives, then have Bitcoiners now become the new conservatives set on maintaining the crypto-financial order?

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, makes the point that Liberals and Conservatives are both largely correct about their central concerns they just prioritize different values and dont understand where the other side is coming from. The same is probably true for Bitcoin and Ethereum. For many Bitcoiners, its all about hard money, stability, immutability and security, so theyre unwilling to risk whats been built. Why improve on perfection? That makes Ethereum a fail. But for many Ethereans, its all about experimenting in the name of making technological progress, which makes Bitcoin a fail. If a few things get broken along the way like the DAO hack, ICO scammers and DeFi smart contract bugs thats just the cost of progress.

Id rather avoid left and right wing, said Bitcoiner McCormack. Id rather say Bitcoin is conservative; therefore, its likely to attract more people with conservative viewpoints.

Move slowly. Dont fuck this up. This is the best money weve ever had. Its slowly, slowly simple, simple.

And yes, Ethereum you could argue is McCormack clearly couldnt bring himself to call Ethereum more progressive. Instead he said: I think Ethereum people just want to go out and experiment, kind of like scientists, experimental technologists. They want to do a lot more with it.

Warwick is one of those scientists who is comfortable with change. Synthetix began life as a stablecoin project, morphed into synthetic derivatives, and continues to reinvent itself once or twice a year as new ideas come along.

He attempted to integrate Bitcoin with online payments in 2012 but saw the technology as a starting point, rather than a finished product.

People who wanted to opt out of the legacy financial system, a lot of those people, you know, ended up in Bitcoin, he said. And then people who wanted to kind of extend the power of Bitcoin and extend the potential of what could be built ended up in Ethereum. If you didnt end up in Ethereum, almost by definition, you were someone who was kind of less open to innovation and more conservative.

Greenspan makes the point that Bitcoin is also much bigger, which limits its ability to turn on a dime.

Bitcoin is a whale compared to Ethereum, which is more like a fly but you know, flies can move a lot faster than whales can, he said. They can do different things. Sometimes theyll keep running into a window in the hope of finding an exit, whereas whales are pretty predictable. Theyre not going to suddenly turn around and go the other way.

Warwick believes that the Ethereum community embraces more progressive politics.

The Crypto Twitter that Im in is very deep Ethereum Twitter, he explained. There is an awareness of societal issues outside of just financial infrastructure. I think that people are much more open to these things and some questioning of the structure of society and how its evolved, he said.

This political bent shares some similarities with Silicon Valleys left-wing, utopian politics, where technology is seen as something that can kind of solve all of the worlds problems.

I am very sympathetic to that view, Warwick said. One of the interesting things about Ethereum is this idea of restructuring the financial infrastructure of the world to make it more open and transparent, and lower barriers to entry. I think its really powerful. Technological progress could be one of the biggest levers that weve ever seen in terms of improving the world. So, I still am hopeful and optimistic about technological progress.Which isnt to say many Bitcoiners dont also dream of a better and brighter future due to Bitcoins innate properties. But theres also considerable focus on Bitcoin as an insurance policy against hyperinflation and the collapse of fiat, which is an altogether more dystopian future.

McCormack has a much less positive view of Ethereums grand ambitions. I think theres a lot more interference on the left, a lot more desire for rules about what you can, you cant do, for that kind of stupid equality of outcome, he said. I think, I think you may find that a little bit of that in the Bitcoin versus Ethereum thing. I have noticed that Vitalik tends to express more socialist opinions, which is perhaps why Ethereums monetary policy is looser than that of Bitcoin.

Having an undisputed leader like Buterin in a decentralized project also sees Ethereum accused of top-down control and centralized planning. Bitcoin maximalist Samson Mow from Blockstream attacked Buterin on McCormacks podcast in mid-August for saying years ago that the internet of money should not cost five cents a transaction.That is very anti-free market, Mow claimed. Thats a Soviet-type economic event. Thats a central planning agency that sets the levels of production wages and prices of goods, whereas I think most Bitcoiners are very free market and capitalists, which is, you know, transactions will cost what they cost.On HackerNoon, journalist Kay Kurokawa wrote of Ethereum that its leftist tendency is made clear by the grandiose plans of its developers and the actions it has taken to resolve difficult situations such as the DAO hack. Their proposed move to proof of stake will certainly move Ethereum even further to the left.But for all of this criticism of Ethereums politics, its not a particularly ideological project. McCormack himself made this point at the end of the Buterin/Samson Mow debate.

For me, I think whats really missing in Ethereum is a strong philosophical backbone, he said. And thats what Bitcoin has, and why we dont have yield farming and YAMs and all this bullshit existing on Bitcoin because its very simple and just focused on one thing, which is what I like about it.

In the end, what unites people in the blockchain world is arguably more important than what divides us. One thing that almost everyone interviewed for this piece agreed on was that there continues to be a wide streak of libertarianism running through crypto culture. Although what is known as Libertarianism is most closely associated these days with guns and freedom lovers on the American right, there have been plenty of left-wing libertarian movements over the years from the peace and love hippies to anti-authoritarian punk rockers. Libertarianism is probably best described as a preference thats at the opposite end of the scale to authoritarianism.

I think a lot of the people who are building the space truly believe that there are fundamental flaws in the status quo and want to fix them, and I think that most of the time, or quite often, that does come from some sense of anti-authoritarianism or being against the establishment, said Warwick.

At a deeper level, anti-authoritarianism seems baked into the design of blockchain itself. Authoritarian elements on the far left and the far right might want to impose their crackpot ideologies by force, but that cant happen with a genuinely decentralized blockchain project because there is no central authority able to impose it.

Decentralization is a libertarian concept by nature. For sure, said Greenspan.

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Is Ethereum left and Bitcoin right? Cointelegraph Magazine - Cointelegraph

Get Ready for the Great Urban Comeback – The Atlantic

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On December 16, 1835, New Yorks rivers turned to ice, and Lower Manhattan went up in flames. Smoke had first appeared curling through the windows of a five-story warehouse near the southern tip of Manhattan. Icy gales blew embers into nearby buildings, and within hours the central commercial district had become an urban bonfire visible more than 100 miles away.

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Firefighters were helpless. Wells and cisterns held little free-flowing water, and the rivers were frozen solid on a night when temperatures plunged, by one account, to 17 degrees below zero. The fire was contained only after Mayor Cornelius Lawrence ordered city officials to blow up structures surrounding it, starving the flames of fuel.

A new Manhattan would grow from the rubblemade of stone rather than wood, with wider streets and taller buildings. But the most important innovation lay outside the city. Forty-one miles to the north, New York officials acquired a large tract of land on both sides of the Croton River, in Westchester County. They built a dam on the river to create a 400-acre lake, and a system of underground tunnels to carry fresh water to every corner of New York City.

The engineering triumph known as the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842. It gave firefighters an ample supply of free-flowing water, even in winter. More important, it brought clean drinking water to residents, who had suffered from one waterborne epidemic after another in previous years, and kick-started a revolution in hygiene. Over the next four decades, New Yorks population quadrupled, to 1.2 millionthe city was on its way to becoming a fully modern metropolis.

The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulationsall were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

Natural and man-made disasters have shaped our greatest cities, and our ideas about human progress, for millennia. Once Romes ancient aqueducts were no longer functionaldamaged first by invaders and then ravaged by timethe citys population dwindled to a few tens of thousands, reviving only during the Renaissance, when engineers restored the flow of water. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 proved so devastating that it caused Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau to question the very merits of urban civilization and call for a return to the natural world. But it also led to the birth of earthquake engineering, which has evolved to make San Francisco, Tokyo, and countless other cities more resilient.

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Americas fractious and tragic response to the COVID-19 pandemic has made the nation look more like a failed state than like the richest country in world history. Doom-scrolling through morbid headlines in 2020, one could easily believe that we have lost our capacity for effective crisis response. And maybe we have. But a major crisis has a way of exposing what is broken and giving a new generation of leaders a chance to build something better. Sometimes the ramifications of their choices are wider than one might think.

As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leedsthey didnt suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis. They were also filled with human waste. It piled up in basements, spilled from gutters, rotted in the streets, and fouled rivers and canals. In Nottinghamthe birthplace of the Luddite movement, which arose to protest textile automationa typical gallon of river water contained 45 grams of solid effluent. Imagine a third of a cup of raw sewage in a gallon jug.

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No outbreak during the industrial age shocked British society as much as the cholera epidemic in 1832. In communities of 100,000 people or more, average life expectancy at birth fell to as low as 26 years. In response, a young government official named Edwin Chadwick, a member of the new Poor Law Commission, conducted an inquiry into urban sanitation. A homely, dyspeptic, and brilliant protg of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Chadwick had farsighted ideas for government. They included shortening the workday, shifting spending from prisons to preventive policing, and establishing government pensions. With a team of researchers, Chadwick undertook one of the earliest public-health investigations in historya hodgepodge of mapmaking, census-taking, and dumpster diving. They looked at sewers, dumps, and waterways. They interviewed police officers, factory inspectors, and others as they explored the relationship between city design and disease proliferation.

The final report, titled The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, caused a revolution. Conventional wisdom at the time held that disease was largely the result of individual moral shortcomings. Chadwick showed that disease arose from failures of the urban environment. Urban disease, he calculated, was creating more than 1 million new orphans in Britain each decade. The number of people who had died of poverty and disease in British cities in any given year in the 1830s, he found, was greater than the annual death toll of any military conflict in the empires history. The cholera outbreak was a major event that forced the British government to reckon with the costs of industrial capitalism. That reckoning would also change the way Western cities thought about the role of the state in ensuring public health.

The source of the cholera problem? All that filthy water. Chadwick recommended that the government improve drainage systems and create local councils to clear away refuse and nuisancehuman and animal wastefrom homes and streets. His investigation inspired two key pieces of national legislation, both passed in 1848: the Public Health Act and the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Act. A new national Board of Health kept the pressure on public authorities. The fruits of engineering (paved streets, clean water, sewage disposal) and of science (a better understanding of disease) led to healthier lives, and longer ones. Life expectancy reached 40 in England and Wales in 1880, and exceeded 60 in 1940.

Chadwicks legacy went beyond longevity statistics. Although he is not often mentioned in the same breath as Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, his work was instrumental in pushing forward the progressive revolution in Western government. Health care and income support, which account for the majority of spending by almost every developed economy in the 21st century, are descendants of Chadwicks report. David Rosner, a history and public-health professor at Columbia University, puts it simply: If I had to think of one person who truly changed the world in response to an urban crisis, I would name Edwin Chadwick. His population-based approach to the epidemics of the 1830s developed a whole new way of thinking about disease in the next half century. He invented an entire ethos of public health in the West.

Everyone knows the story: On the night of October 8, 1871, a fire broke out in a barn owned by Patrick and Catherine OLeary in southwest Chicago. Legend blames a cow tipping over a lantern. Whatever the cause, gusty winds drove the fire northeast, toward Lake Michigan. In the go-go, ramshackle era of 19th-century expansion, two-thirds of Chicagos structures were built of timber, making the city perfect kindling. In the course of three days, the fire devoured 20,000 buildings. Three hundred people died. A third of the city was left without shelter. The entire business districtthree square mileswas a wasteland.

On October 11, as the city smoldered, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial with an all-caps headline: cheer up. The newspaper went on: In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the worlds history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years accumulations, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that chicago shall rise again. And, with astonishing speed, it did. By 1875, tourists arriving in Chicago looking for evidence of the fire complained that there was little to see. Within 20 years, Chicagos population tripled, to 1 million. And by the end of the century, the fire-flattened business district sprouted scores of buildings taller than you could find anywhere else in the world. Their unprecedented height earned these structures a new name: skyscraper.

The Chicago fire enabled the rise of skyscrapers in three major ways. First, it made land available for new buildings. The fire may have destroyed the business district, but the railway system remained intact, creating ideal conditions for new construction. So much capital flowed into Chicago that downtown real-estate prices actually rose in the first 12 months after the fire. The 1871 fire wiped out the rich business heart of the city, and so there was lots of money and motivation to rebuild immediately, Julius L. Jones, an assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum, told me. It might have been different if the fire had just wiped out poor areas and left the banks and business offices alone. Whats more, he said, the city used the debris from the fire to extend the shoreline into Lake Michigan and create more land.

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Second, a combination of regulatory and technological developments changed what Chicago was made of. Insurance companies and city governments mandated fire-resistant construction. At first, Chicago rebuilt with brick, stone, iron. But over time, the urge to create a fireproof city in an environment of escalating real-estate prices pushed architects and builders to experiment with steel, a material made newly affordable by recent innovations. Steel-skeleton frames not only offered more protection from fire; they also supported more weight, allowing buildings to grow taller.

Third, and most important, post-fire reconstruction brought together a cluster of young architects who ultimately competed with one another to build higher and higher. In the simplest rendition of this story, the visionary architect William Le Baron Jenney masterminded the construction of what is considered historys first skyscraper, the 138-foot-tall Home Insurance Building, which opened in 1885. But the skyscrapers invention was a team effort, with Jenney serving as a kind of player-coach. In 1882, Jenneys apprentice, Daniel Burnham, had collaborated with another architect, John Root, to design the 130-foot-tall Montauk Building, which was the first high steel building to open in Chicago. Another Jenney protg, Louis Sullivan, along with Dankmar Adler, designed the 135-foot-tall Wainwright Building, the first skyscraper in St. Louis. Years later, Ayn Rand would base The Fountainhead on a fictionalized version of Sullivan and his protg, Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a false narrative: Sullivan and Wright are depicted as lone eagles, paragons of rugged individualism, Edward Glaeser wrote in Triumph of the City. They werent. They were great architects deeply enmeshed in an urban chain of innovation.

It is impossible to know just how much cities everywhere have benefited from Chicagos successful experiments in steel-skeleton construction. By enabling developers to add great amounts of floor space without needing additional ground area, the skyscraper has encouraged density. Finding ways to safely fit more people into cities has led to a faster pace of innovation, greater retail experimentation, and more opportunities for middle- and low-income families to live near business hubs. People in dense areas also own fewer cars and burn hundreds of gallons less gasoline each year than people in nonurban areas. Ecologically and economically, and in terms of equity and opportunity, the skyscraper, forged in the architectural milieu of post-fire Chicago, is one of the most triumphant inventions in urban history.

March 10, 1888, was a gorgeous Saturday in New York City. Walt Whitman, the staff poet at The New York Herald, used the weekend to mark the end of winter: Forth from its sunny nook of shelterd grassinnocent, golden, calm as the dawn / The springs first dandelion shows its trustful face. On Saturday evening, the citys meteorologist, known lovingly as the weather prophet to local newspapers, predicted more fair weather followed by a spot of rain. Then the weather prophet went home and took Sunday off.

Meanwhile, two storms converged. From the Gulf of Mexico, a shelf of dark clouds soaked with moisture crept north. And from the Great Lakes, a cold front that had already smothered Minnesota with snow rolled east. The fronts collided over New York City.

Residents awoke on Monday, the day Whitmans poem was published, to the worst blizzard in U.S. history. By Thursday morning, the storm had dumped more than 50 inches of snow in parts of the Northeast. Snowdrifts were blown into formations 50 feet high. Food deliveries were suspended, and mothers ran short on milk. Hundreds died of exposure and starvation. Like the Lisbon earthquake more than a century before, the blizzard of 1888 was not just a natural disaster; it was also a psychological blow. The great machine of New York seized up and went silent. Its nascent electrical system failed. Industries stopped operating. The elevated railways service broke down completely, the New York Weekly Tribune reported on March 14:

The New York now buried under snow had been a steampunk jungle. Elevated trains clang-clanged through neighborhoods; along the streets, electrical wires looped and drooped from thousands of poles. Yet 20 years after the storm, the trains and wires had mostly vanishedat least so far as anyone aboveground could see. To protect its most important elements of infrastructure from the weather, New York realized, it had to put them underground.

First, New York buried the wires. In early 1889, telegraph, telephone, and utility companies were given 90 days to get rid of all their visible infrastructure. New Yorks industrial forest of utility poles was cleared, allowing some residents to see the street outside their windows for the first time. Underground conduits proved cheaper to maintain, and they could fit more bandwidth, which ultimately meant more telephones and more electricity.

Second, and even more important, New York buried its elevated trains, creating the countrys most famous subway system. An underground rapid transit system would have done what the elevated trains could not do, The New York Times had written in the days after the blizzard, blasting the inadequacy of the elevated railroad system to such an emergency. Even without a blizzard, as Doug Most details in The Race Underground, New Yorks streets were becoming impassable scrums of pedestrians, trolleys, horses, and carriages. The year before the blizzard, the elevated rails saw an increase of 13 million passengers. The need for some alternativeand likely subterraneanform of transportation was obvious. London had opened the first part of its subway system several decades earlier. In New York, the blizzard was the trigger.

New York is built on disasters, Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU, told me recently. Theres the 1835 fire, and the construction of the Croton Aqueduct. Theres the 1888 blizzard, and the construction of the subway. Theres the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 146 workers in Manhattan. Frances Perkins would say, The New Deal started with the factory fire, because it was the disaster that led to a New York State commission on labor conditions, which in turn led to the eight-hour workday. In all of these physical disasters, New York City has responded by changing for the better.

Read: How Frances Perkins, the first woman in the U.S. Cabinet, found her vocation

In October 1904, after years of political fights, contractor negotiations, and engineering challenges, New Yorks first subway line opened. In a lightning-bolt shape, it ran north from city hall to Grand Central Station, hooked west along 42nd Street, and then turned north again at Times Square, running all the way to 145th Street and Broadway, in Harlem. Operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the 28-stop subway line was known as the IRT. Just months later, New York faced a crucial test: another massive winter storm. As the blizzard raged, the IRT superintendent reported 446,000 passengers transported, a record daily high achieved without a single mishap.

Not all calamities summon forth the better angels of our nature. A complete survey of urban disasters might show something closer to the opposite: Status-quo bias can prove more powerful than the need for urgent change. As U.S. manufacturing jobs declined in the latter half of the 20th century, cities like Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, fell into disrepair, as leaders failed to anticipate what the transition to a postindustrial future would require. When business districts are destroyedas in Chicago in 1871an influx of capital may save the day. But when the urban victims are poor or minorities, post-crisis rebuilding can be slow, if it happens at all. Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005 and displaced countless low-income residents, many of whom never returned. Some cataclysms are not so much about bricks and mortar as they are about inequality and injustice. Natural disasters on their own dont do anything to stem injustice, observes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton. Without social movements or social upheaval, the recognition of inequities never progresses beyond an acknowledgment that We have a long way to go.

Still, catastrophes can fix our minds on a common crisis, pull down political and regulatory barriers that stand in the way of progress, and spur technological leaps, bringing talent and money together to solve big problems. Disasters reveal problems that already existed, and in doing so, create an opportunity to go back and do what you should have done the first time, Mitchell Moss said. New York City didnt have to suffer a devastating fire in 1835 to know that it needed a freshwater source. Nonetheless, when Lower Manhattan burned, city leaders were persuaded to act.

Normal times do not offer a convenient news peg for slow-rolling catastrophes. When we look at the world around usat outdated or crumbling infrastructure, at inadequate health care, at racism and povertyit is all too easy to cultivate an attitude of small-minded resignation: This is just the way it has always been. Calamity can stir us from the trance of complacency and force us to ask first-principle questions about the world: What is a community for? How is it put together? What are its basic needs? How should we provide them?

These are the questions we should be asking about our own world as we confront the coronavirus pandemic and think about what should come after. The most important changes following past catastrophes went beyond the catastrophe itself. They accounted fully for the problems that had been revealed, and conceived of solutions broadly. New York did not react to the blizzard of 1888 by stockpiling snow shovels. It created an entire infrastructure of subterranean power and transit that made the city cleaner, more equitable, and more efficient.

The response to COVID-19 could be similarly far-reaching. The greatest lesson of the outbreak may be that modern cities are inadequately designed to keep us safe, not only from coronaviruses, but from other forms of infectious disease and from environmental conditions, such as pollution (which contributes to illness) and overcrowding (which contributes to the spread of illness). What if we designed a city with a greater awareness of all threats to our health?

The responses could start with a guarantee of universal health care, whatever the specific mechanism. COVID-19 has shown that our survival is inextricably connected to the health of strangers. Because of unequal access to health care, among other reasons, many peopleespecially low-income and nonwhite Americanshave been disproportionately hard-hit by the pandemic. People with low incomes are more likely than others to live in multigenerational households, making pathways of transmission more varied. People with serious preexisting conditions have often lacked routine access to preventive careand people with such conditions have experienced higher rates of mortality from COVID-19. When it comes to infectious diseases, a risk to anyone is a risk to everyone. Meanwhile, because of their size, density, and exposure to foreign travelers, cities initially bore the brunt of this pandemic. There is no reason to think the pattern will change. In an age of pandemics, universal health care is not just a safety net; it is a matter of national security.

City leaders could redesign cities to save lives in two ways. First, they could clamp down on automotive traffic. While that may seem far afield from the current pandemic, long-term exposure to pollution from cars and trucks causes more than 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States, according to a 2013 study. Respiratory conditions aggravated by pollution can increase vulnerability to other illnesses, including infectious ones. The pandemic shutdowns have shown us what an alternative urban future might look like. Cities could remove most cars from downtown areas and give these streets back to the people. In the short term, this would serve our pandemic-fighting efforts by giving restaurants and bars more outdoor space. In the long term, it would transform cities for the betteradding significantly more room for walkers and bicycle lanes, and making the urban way of life more healthy and attractive.

Second, cities could fundamentally rethink the design and uses of modern buildings. Future pandemics caused by airborne viruses are inevitableEast Asia has had several this century, alreadyyet too many modern buildings achieve energy efficiency by sealing off outside air, thus creating the perfect petri dish for any disease that thrives in unventilated interiors. Local governments should update ventilation standards to make offices less dangerous. Further, as more Americans work remotely to avoid crowded trains and poorly ventilated offices, local governments should also encourage developers to turn vacant buildings into apartment complexes, through new zoning laws and tax credits. Converting empty offices into apartments would add more housing in rich cities with a shortage of affordable places to live, expand the tax base, and further reduce driving by letting more families make their homes downtown.

Altogether, this is a vision of a 21st-century city remade with public health in mind, achieving the neat trick of being both more populated and more capacious. An urban world with half as many cars would be a triumph. Indoor office and retail space would become less valuable, outdoor space would become more essential, and city streets would be reclaimed by the people.

Right now, with COVID, were all putting our hopes in one thingone cure, one vaccineand it speaks to how narrow our vision of society has become, says Rosner, the Columbia public-health historian. His hero, Chadwick, went further. He used an existential crisis to rewrite the rules of modern governance. He shaped our thinking about the states responsibility to the poor as much as he reshaped the modern city. We should hope that our response to the 2020 pandemic is Chadwickian in its capacity to help us see the preexisting injustices laid bare by this disease.

One day, when COVID-19 is a distant memory, a historian of urban catastrophe might observe, in reviewing the record, that human beings looked up, to the sky, after a fire; looked down, into the earth, after a blizzard; and at last looked around, at one another, after a plague.

This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline How Disaster Shaped the Modern City.

* Illustration by Mark Harris; images from Interborough Rapid Transit Company; National Weather Service; Wiley & Putnam / Artokoloro / British Library / Alamy; Thomas Kelly / Library of Congress

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Get Ready for the Great Urban Comeback - The Atlantic

Build your own robots with this kit on sale for $50.15 – Mashable

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Products featured here are selected by our partners at StackCommerce.If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.These Smart Nano Bots come with 70 parts, 250 components, and tools.

Image: geeek club

By StackCommerceMashable Shopping2020-09-06 09:00:00 UTC

TL;DR: Have fun while working on your engineering skills with Smart Nano Bots (including 70 parts, 250 components, and tools) for $50.15, a savings of over $100 as of Sept. 6.

We might've joked about robots taking over the world in the past, but today, it's no joke. Robots are restocking shelves, cleaning houses, delivering packages, and even driving for us. They're making our lives easier, inspiring us, and even entertaining us in these unprecedented times. But who are the folks behind these awe-inspiring, intelligent machines? After all, robots don't just appear out of thin air.

The technical geniuses building these complex creations are mostly electrical and mechanical engineers but with this Geeek Club Robot Construction Kit, you can get a little taste of their genius and develop your own robot-building skills that will amaze and entertain. Successfully funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo at $137k and $145k, respectively, this DIY kit allows you learn engineering skills and build robots without boring yourself to tears with courses and textbooks.

In the kit, you'll get all the motors, sensors, and robotic pieces you need to craft your own miniature troop of seven smart, roving robots. Plus, you'll get step-by-step instructions that make building robots no more complicated than other common construction toys and instructional videos where the inventor of the kit shows you exactly how they work. Of course, you'll also learn all the electrical information to familiarize yourself with the components and how to solder them onto the printed circuit boards.

Check out this unboxing video to get a glimpse at what you'll be working with:

Beyond having a bunch of tiny robots to show off to your friends, family, and coworkers, you'll also develop structural, hardware, and electrical engineering skills, artistic design skills, and soldering skills. And the best part? You don't have to sit in a classroom or read a textbook to do it.

Regularly $99 and on sale for $59, you can snatch this kit for a steal for a limited time. Take an extra 15% off the sale price using the code GOFORIT15 and you'll pay just $50.15 during Labor Day weekend.

Prices subject to change.

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Build your own robots with this kit on sale for $50.15 - Mashable

Phase engineering and the final frontier! – Advanced Science News

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With a mastery of material phases, over the years scientists have developed more sustainable and groundbreaking technological advancements.

Image credit: chuttersnap on Unsplash

From Harry Potters cloak of invisibility and Star Treks transparent aluminum glasses, an intricate manipulation of the structure of matter has been envisaged to lend material properties that almost seem magical. Arthur Clarkes third law well encapsulates these scenarios from fantasies to fiction: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!

Our ability to manipulate materials into a functional form correlates with the evolution of civilization. Metrics on the quality of life improved as we progressed from stone to bronze to iron to ceramic to polymer, and now, to the electronic age. Progress, however, came with a penalty, as is evident from estimates of the enormity of the climate crisis and species extinction rates. Hence, the quest to leapfrog towards sustainable energy technologies is ever more critical.

Mastery over materials has come about as a result of material processing at high temperatures. The high temperature facilitates overcoming energy barriers and enables the material to seek its lowest energy state. While the implications of high-temperature manipulation may be intuitive in non-carbon hard materials like steel, even for soft materials like polymers, pioneering applications came via thermosetting polymers like nitrocellulose. However, the associated most stable structureis not always the one with desired properties. In addition to high temperature, if processing involves high pressure, atoms can be brought closer to each other and the material can be temporarily stabilized with structures not corresponding to that of the lowest energy phase. For example, nature manages to metastabilize carbon as desirable diamonds, but this is via a route that includes both high-pressure and high temperature.

Exploring materials properties as a function of their characteristic dimension, besides just temperature and pressure, gave raise to the birth of nanoscience and nanotechnology. It is only on the nanoscale that one can discuss the phase of materials and still have the surfaces of materials play a vibrant role in terms of energetics of the material. Below the nano-lengthscale, there are only fluxional aggregates of molecules without meaningful convergent properties to deliberate phases of materials. Above the nano-lengthscale, the materials have matured to a less exciting asymptote and do not show any variation in properties as a function of their dimension.

Nanostructures with their emergent properties, like size-dependent optical properties, have captured the imagination of scientists for the last four decades. For example, nanoparticles with the same chemical composition but different sizes may appear to have different colors. Critical to the control of the size of the nanoparticle are chemical species called ligands a word whose Latin origin means to bind. The chemical structure and amount of ligands determine to what extent they bind to the nanoparticles, which in turn control their energy and sizes. Thus, synthesis of nanoparticles in the last four decades involves ligandsetting as opposed to thermosetting practiced over the last four thousand years. This ligand-driven method of manipulation is the essence of chimie douce or soft chemistry, which involves the assembly of materials at ambient pressures and temperatures.

Mother nature is a master of chimie douce and uses it to bequeath biomolecules with an infinite variety of properties. The exquisite variation in properties is most evident in proteins. A protein folds and assembles in an aqueous medium to generate its functional form, which is called its native structure. An artificial physicochemical intervention, like excess salt and heat, may result in the misfolding of proteins into its non-functional structure, which is referred to as non-native polymorph. The non-native protein forms can have a debilitating consequence and have been implicated in diseases like Prions and Alzheimers diseases.

Over the last decade, the concept of non-native polymorphs has been extended systematically to inorganic systems and explored in the context of solar-energy conversion, optoelectronics, electrocatalysis, and lithium-ion-batteries. Using the material design strategy of non-native polymorphs, it is demonstrated that the performance of a variety of electrochemical devices can be improved without changing its chemical composition, thereby broadening the phase space for materials exploration.

With the broadening of (material phase) space and scientists reconnoitering where no one has ever one before, the revelations of the Ministry of Magic and of Star Trek may well appear to be scientific facts rather than fantasy or fiction!

Written by:

Raj Ganesh S. Pala, professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering and an associate faculty of the materials science program, Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (IIT-K)

Prashant Kumar Gupta, visiting assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology at Dhanbad

Sulay Saha, post-doctoral-fellow at the Washington University at St. Louis

Reference: Sulay Saha, Prashant Kumar Gupta, Raj Ganesh S. Pala, Stabilization of Non-Native Polymorphs for Electrocatalysis and Energy Storage Systems, WIREs Energy and Environment (2020). DOI: 10.1002/wene.389

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Phase engineering and the final frontier! - Advanced Science News

Impact Of Covid-19 on Graphene Market 2020 Industry Challenges, Business Overview and Forecast Research Study 2026 – Owned

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Graphene Market Data and Acquisition Research Study with Trends and Opportunities 2019-2024The study of Graphene market is a compilation of the market of Graphene broken down into its entirety on the basis of types, application, trends and opportunities, mergers and acquisitions, drivers and restraints, and a global outreach. The detailed study also offers a board interpretation of the Graphene industry from a variety of data points that are collected through reputable and verified sources. Furthermore, the study sheds a lights on a market interpretations on a global scale which is further distributed through distribution channels, generated incomes sources and a marginalized market space where most trade occurs.

Along with a generalized market study, the report also consists of the risks that are often neglected when it comes to the Graphene industry in a comprehensive manner. The study is also divided in an analytical space where the forecast is predicted through a primary and secondary research methodologies along with an in-house model.

Download PDF Sample of Graphene Market report @ https://hongchunresearch.com/request-a-sample/74744

Key players in the global Graphene market covered in Chapter 4:The New Hong MstarDeyang Carbon TechnologyAngstron MaterialsPerpetuus Advanced MaterialsNano X ploreCambridge NanosystemsUnited Nano-TechnologiesXG ScienceGroup Tangshan JianhuaAbalonyxNing Bo Mo Xi TechnologyJining Leader Nano TechnologyThomas SwanGranpheneaBeijing Carbon Century TechnologySixth Element Technology

In Chapter 11 and 13.3, on the basis of types, the Graphene market from 2015 to 2026 is primarily split into:Graphene PowderGraphene OxideGraphene Film

In Chapter 12 and 13.4, on the basis of applications, the Graphene market from 2015 to 2026 covers:Photovoltaic CellsComposite MaterialsBiological EngineeringOther

Geographically, the detailed analysis of consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate, historic and forecast (2015-2026) of the following regions are covered in Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13:North America (Covered in Chapter 6 and 13)United StatesCanadaMexicoEurope (Covered in Chapter 7 and 13)GermanyUKFranceItalySpainRussiaOthersAsia-Pacific (Covered in Chapter 8 and 13)ChinaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndiaSoutheast AsiaOthersMiddle East and Africa (Covered in Chapter 9 and 13)Saudi ArabiaUAEEgyptNigeriaSouth AfricaOthersSouth America (Covered in Chapter 10 and 13)BrazilArgentinaColumbiaChileOthers

For a global outreach, the Graphene study also classifies the market into a global distribution where key market demographics are established based on the majority of the market share. The following markets that are often considered for establishing a global outreach are North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World. Depending on the study, the following markets are often interchanged, added, or excluded as certain markets only adhere to certain products and needs.

Here is a short glance at what the study actually encompasses:Study includes strategic developments, latest product launches, regional growth markers and mergers & acquisitionsRevenue, cost price, capacity & utilizations, import/export rates and market shareForecast predictions are generated from analytical data sources and calculated through a series of in-house processes.

However, based on requirements, this report could be customized for specific regions and countries.

Brief about Graphene Market Report with [emailprotected] https://hongchunresearch.com/report/graphene-market-size-2020-74744

Some Point of Table of Content:

Chapter One: Report Overview

Chapter Two: Global Market Growth Trends

Chapter Three: Value Chain of Graphene Market

Chapter Four: Players Profiles

Chapter Five: Global Graphene Market Analysis by Regions

Chapter Six: North America Graphene Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter Seven: Europe Graphene Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter Eight: Asia-Pacific Graphene Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter Nine: Middle East and Africa Graphene Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter Ten: South America Graphene Market Analysis by Countries

Chapter Eleven: Global Graphene Market Segment by Types

Chapter Twelve: Global Graphene Market Segment by Applications12.1 Global Graphene Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Applications (2015-2020)12.1.1 Global Graphene Sales and Market Share by Applications (2015-2020)12.1.2 Global Graphene Revenue and Market Share by Applications (2015-2020)12.2 Photovoltaic Cells Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2015-2020)12.3 Composite Materials Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2015-2020)12.4 Biological Engineering Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2015-2020)12.5 Other Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2015-2020)

Chapter Thirteen: Graphene Market Forecast by Regions (2020-2026) continued

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List of tablesList of Tables and FiguresTable Global Graphene Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2020-2026)Figure Global Graphene Market Share by Type in 2019 & 2026Figure Graphene Powder FeaturesFigure Graphene Oxide FeaturesFigure Graphene Film FeaturesTable Global Graphene Market Size Growth by Application (2020-2026)Figure Global Graphene Market Share by Application in 2019 & 2026Figure Photovoltaic Cells DescriptionFigure Composite Materials DescriptionFigure Biological Engineering DescriptionFigure Other DescriptionFigure Global COVID-19 Status OverviewTable Influence of COVID-19 Outbreak on Graphene Industry DevelopmentTable SWOT AnalysisFigure Porters Five Forces AnalysisFigure Global Graphene Market Size and Growth Rate 2015-2026Table Industry NewsTable Industry PoliciesFigure Value Chain Status of GrapheneFigure Production Process of GrapheneFigure Manufacturing Cost Structure of GrapheneFigure Major Company Analysis (by Business Distribution Base, by Product Type)Table Downstream Major Customer Analysis (by Region)Table The New Hong Mstar ProfileTable The New Hong Mstar Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Deyang Carbon Technology ProfileTable Deyang Carbon Technology Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Angstron Materials ProfileTable Angstron Materials Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Perpetuus Advanced Materials ProfileTable Perpetuus Advanced Materials Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Nano X plore ProfileTable Nano X plore Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Cambridge Nanosystems ProfileTable Cambridge Nanosystems Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table United Nano-Technologies ProfileTable United Nano-Technologies Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table XG Science ProfileTable XG Science Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Group Tangshan Jianhua ProfileTable Group Tangshan Jianhua Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Abalonyx ProfileTable Abalonyx Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Ning Bo Mo Xi Technology ProfileTable Ning Bo Mo Xi Technology Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Jining Leader Nano Technology ProfileTable Jining Leader Nano Technology Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Thomas Swan ProfileTable Thomas Swan Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Granphenea ProfileTable Granphenea Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Beijing Carbon Century Technology ProfileTable Beijing Carbon Century Technology Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Table Sixth Element Technology ProfileTable Sixth Element Technology Production, Value, Price, Gross Margin 2015-2020Figure Global Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Global Graphene Revenue ($) and Growth (2015-2020)Table Global Graphene Sales by Regions (2015-2020)Table Global Graphene Sales Market Share by Regions (2015-2020)Table Global Graphene Revenue ($) by Regions (2015-2020)Table Global Graphene Revenue Market Share by Regions (2015-2020)Table Global Graphene Revenue Market Share by Regions in 2015Table Global Graphene Revenue Market Share by Regions in 2019Figure North America Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Europe Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Middle East and Africa Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure South America Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure North America Graphene Revenue ($) and Growth (2015-2020)Table North America Graphene Sales by Countries (2015-2020)Table North America Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure North America Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure North America Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2019Table North America Graphene Revenue ($) by Countries (2015-2020)Table North America Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure North America Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure North America Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2019Figure United States Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Canada Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Mexico Graphene Sales and Growth (2015-2020)Figure Europe Graphene Revenue ($) Growth (2015-2020)Table Europe Graphene Sales by Countries (2015-2020)Table Europe Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure Europe Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure Europe Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2019Table Europe Graphene Revenue ($) by Countries (2015-2020)Table Europe Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure Europe Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure Europe Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2019Figure Germany Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure UK Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure France Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Italy Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Spain Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Russia Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Revenue ($) and Growth (2015-2020)Table Asia-Pacific Graphene Sales by Countries (2015-2020)Table Asia-Pacific Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Sales Market Share by Countries in 2019Table Asia-Pacific Graphene Revenue ($) by Countries (2015-2020)Table Asia-Pacific Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries (2015-2020)Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2015Figure Asia-Pacific Graphene Revenue Market Share by Countries in 2019Figure China Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Japan Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure South Korea Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Australia Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure India Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Southeast Asia Graphene Sales and Growth Rate (2015-2020)Figure Middle East and Africa Graphene Revenue ($) and Growth (2015-2020) continued

About HongChun Research:HongChun Research main aim is to assist our clients in order to give a detailed perspective on the current market trends and build long-lasting connections with our clientele. Our studies are designed to provide solid quantitative facts combined with strategic industrial insights that are acquired from proprietary sources and an in-house model.

Contact Details:Jennifer GrayManager Global Sales+ 852 8170 0792[emailprotected]

NOTE: Our report does take into account the impact of coronavirus pandemic and dedicates qualitative as well as quantitative sections of information within the report that emphasizes the impact of COVID-19.

As this pandemic is ongoing and leading to dynamic shifts in stocks and businesses worldwide, we take into account the current condition and forecast the market data taking into consideration the micro and macroeconomic factors that will be affected by the pandemic.

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Impact Of Covid-19 on Graphene Market 2020 Industry Challenges, Business Overview and Forecast Research Study 2026 - Owned

The Role of Electron Microscopy in Battery Research – AZoM

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Dr. Shirley Meng is a professor and Zable Endowed Chair at the Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego. She is the principal investigator for the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), and also the founding director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) at UCSD, whose faculty studies materials and devices for energy capture, conversion, and utilization. Dr. Meng was the featured speaker at the Women in Microscopy Breakfast at M&M 2020, where she spoke about her career and the continued importance of women in science. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Im actually a microscopist by training. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in materials science and engineering, and I have operated electron microscopes and used electron microscopy since I was an undergraduate student.I still remember seeing the rows of atoms show up in the detector for the first time. Its a thrilling feeling thats indescribable. They werent just drawings of balls in a textbook, I was actually seeing the atoms on the screen right in front of me. Youre essentially making the invisible visible, and there are no other tools that allow you to do this, only top-of-the-line microscopes allow you to see atom columns like that.

The center consists of a group of faculty members who are working on the materials and devices that can capture and store energy, convert it from one form to the other, and utilize it. Broadly, we call this distributed energy generation and storage as well as integrated power management.

I lead the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion(LESC), where we work to diagnose and characterize materials for energy storage.

For instance, we look at state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries in order to understand why their electrode materials degrade and how we can capture this degradation while the device is in operation. We call this operando characterization. Once we figure out how and why the materials degrade, we can formulate engineering strategies to improve their properties in this case, make the batteries safer, more powerful, and longer-lasting.

We use X-ray, neutron, and electron-based tools. For the X-ray and neutron-based experiments, we work with national laboratories in order to access their instrumentation, but we have local access to the electron-based tools, such as electron microscopes and focused ion beam instruments. These are oftentimes Thermo Fisher Scientific products.

Lets be clear; at the moment, batteries are a very safe product. Safe enough that people carry them around every day in their phones, laptops, etc.

The typical accident rate is less than 1 in 10 million cells; however, we now have hundreds of thousands of electric cars (running on lithium-ion batteries) being sold everywhere around the world. As they are part of a vehicle, the safety of the batteries is now extremely important; when theres a vehicular accident, we don't want to see it amplified by the battery catching fire or exploding. Thats why current research focuses on things like solid-state batteries, where the flammable liquid electrolyte is replaced by a solid-state electrolyte, making the battery safer without sacrificing energy or power.

So, thats one of the main areas of battery research, and we are very excited to be part of it. At the same time, characterization and diagnostic tools allow us to figure out which solid-state electrolytes are the best choice for the next generation of batteries.

Energy storage is typically considered the Achilles heel of the renewable energy transition and is one of the biggest drivers of research in the field. When youre producing wind and solar energy, you have to have sufficient energy storage capacity so that it can be stored when its available and then used later, when its needed.

In this regard, electrochemical devices, like batteries, are really critical. They convert the electricity to chemical bonding energy and then back from chemical energy to electricity without combustion. So, it's an extremely efficient process. This technology will really be a game-changer if we want to cut CO2 emission and enable renewable energy technologies. Electric motors can have infinite torque, therefore, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) is driven by the combination of better technology and societal benefits we can be green while enjoying a better vehicle driving experience.

In fact, I think whats different now, compared to 20 years ago, is that corporations can be green, can achieve sustainability, and can make a profit. I believe a lot of industry leaders are going to step in and say, you know, this is an economic decision. We're no longer doing this because there are government subsidies or because we're just getting social returns.

If companies can be even more profitable by being green and being sustainable, this would go a long way to addressing climate change, really slow it down and make the planet a more livable and enjoyable place. I think thats the message I really want to give; you can now be sustainable and make a lot of money.

I think the motivation for all the researchers, graduate students, and postdocs in my laboratory is a fundamental understanding of a materials properties, but this knowledge is only impactful if we find the end-users, the companies, who are actually going to make or utilize these materials in their products. I want to know how we can help them make a better product that is going to positively impact society. Thats why I am actually very motivated to have a strong collaboration with industry partners.

For instance, SPEC has a program where companies can partner with us to fund a graduate student fellowship. This way, they can get a first-hand look at all the intellectual property that is generated. Meanwhile, the students have a very oriented mission for their research, since what they are doing is clearly connected to a final product.

We use high-end instruments, like transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) and synchrotron X-ray sources, to answer specific questions that our industrial partners cant. We can actually dissect the samples and go down to the atomic level, to the nanoscale, to find true answers. Where are the defects? Where are the problems that have happened? Then we feed that knowledge back to our industry partners.

If things like battery failure are happening at the nanoscale, at a molecular level, you need advanced tools to really dig into where the failure starts. You also need the ability to interpret the results of your experiments. This is where academic institutions are extremely useful; our skills are complementary to what the industry is trying to accomplish, and its why our partnership usually works very well.

Yes, our group is also funded through the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and several other federal agencies. Our researchers can use these resources to generate a lot of fundamental understanding and knowledge.

Of course, ideally, this research can reach a point where some actual impact can be measured; I think our most impactful work is directly applicable to the products created by our industry partners. So, really, its a collaborative effort between academia, industry, and the federal government; they all complement each other.

Obviously, there are very clear boundaries as well. As a research institution, we don't develop a product. Our students and postdocs, the human capital, is what we'll offer to society later knowledge and human resources.

The common tool we use is scanning electron microscopy (SEM). However, if you take a battery, it's very bulky and there are layers of cathode, anode, electrolytes, and separators. And on these layers, you have millions of particles you want to analyze. In order to do a detailed diagnosis of the battery, we need some kind of tool to extract samples. For this, we use a focused ion beam (FIB). In the past, this was a gallium ion beam, but through our collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific, we now have access to a plasma FIB, where we can cut a much larger area with higher efficiency.

With the combined FIB and SEM, we can see particles at the micrometer level. Once we have processed the sample, we can then go to the transmission electron microscope, where we can look at the sample at the nanoscale or even the angstrom scale, allowing us to see atoms and molecules. We do this because, to really diagnose battery materials properly, we need to have access to multiple scales with a suite of tools, allowing us to actually probe materials and understand their properties.

So, in my world, I view myself as a doctor for batteries. When a person is sick, the doctor needs a correct diagnosis in order to give the right prescription. To do that, they run many different tests; they draw blood, they take an X-ray or an MRI, etc.

Similarly, we diagnose and characterize materials in order to make sure they are operating at their best optimum conditions. This is critical because they end up in devices that billions of people are carrying every day, everywhere, in the car, on planes, everywhere. We need to diagnose where failures could happen, where issues might occur, using the most advanced tools, characterization, and computations possible. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing, and I'm very excited to share this experience.

We now have a very big community of battery researchers across the world, and I'm hoping that even more, bright and brilliant young scientists will join this field in the future. Were already seeing the younger generation of researchers introduce things like higher throughput characterization and artificial intelligence for data interpretation. The field is really exciting, and there are so many things that could be enabled with advanced characterization tools.

Diversity and inclusion drive innovation and creativity. My own journey as a woman in science started at the age of seven when my dad introduced to me the story about Dr. Marie Curie, the only woman who was awarded the Nobel Prize twice: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Her words have been the guiding principle for me since then. Over the last hundred years, women collectively have made a lot of inroads in the STEM field, but to achieve true equity, our journey will continue. The field of science will attract more talent and become the first choice for women to launch and build their careers if all of us (men and women) are in this together. I feel privileged to be one of the women in science and to be part of the force to implement change. I hope these messages are clearly conveyed to the attendees of the Women in Microscopy Breakfast.

Dr. Y. Shirley Meng received her Ph.D. in Advance Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoc research fellow and subsequent research scientist at MIT. Dr. Meng is currently a professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she holds the position of Zable Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies.

Dr. Meng is the principal investigator of the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC) and is the founding Director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) at UCSD. In 2020, she was also named as the inaugural director of the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design (IMDD).

She is the author and co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and four issued patents, and is the Editor-in-Chief for the Materials Research Society journal MRS Energy & Sustainability.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily represent the views of AZoM.com Limited (T/A) AZoNetwork, the owner and operator of this website. This disclaimer forms part of the Terms and Conditions of use of this website.

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The Role of Electron Microscopy in Battery Research - AZoM

Copper-coated face masks could help slow transmission of COVID-19: U of T researchers – News@UofT

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A team of researchers from the University of Torontos Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering aredeveloping a new way to coat tiny particles of copper onto the inside of fabrics, including those used in face masks a technology that could provide an extra layer of safety against COVID-19.

The goal is to deposit very fine copper particles onto both woven and non-woven fabrics using twin-wire arc (TWA) spray technology. The fabric would then be used in one of the layers of a reusable fabric face mask. Its anticipated the copper-embedded fabric will not affect filter or flow rate parameters and will be able to kill most viral and other pathogens within a few minutes.

By embedding the copper into the fabric, the researchers say masks could provide a continuous and proactive fight against the transmission of current and evolving harmful pathogens without altering the physical barrier properties of the masks themselves.

The anti-microbial properties of copper have been observed since ancient times. Egyptian and Babylonian soldiers would place bronze shavings in their wounds to reduce infection and speed up healing. Today, Mostaghimi and his team including EngineeringsMohini Sain andLarry Pershin,James A. Scott of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health andMaurice Ringuetteof the department of cell and systems biology in the Faculty of Arts & Scienceare exploiting the very same anti-microbial properties to develop coatings that safeguard everything from office furniture to personal protective equipment.

Mostaghimi directs theCentre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT)and has studied the impact of copper coatings oninfections in health-care settings for years, seeing first-hand how copper coatings applied to high-touch surfaces can help kill bacteria.

In one study, a copper coating was applied to the handles of half the chairs in a Toronto General Hospital waiting room. Over the course of five months, researchers recordeda 68 per cent reduction of viable bacteria cells per square centimetreon the treated chair handles.

Research from other groups shows COVID-19 surviving up to two to three days on stainless steel and even longer on other surfaces. However, it has been demonstrated that coronavirus particles are inactivated within four hours when exposed to a copper-coated surface at room temperature.

Traditionally, implementing copper coatings would be very expensive, Mostaghimi explains. But our research has developed a method that makes applying copper coatings more economically viable.

The CACT method is known as twin-wire arc spray. The wire part refers to the fact that the raw copper is supplied in the form of copper wire, which is more affordable than copper powders. The spray allows for large surfaces to be coated efficiently.

Another advantage is that the TWA method allows for spray parameters to be tightly controlled so that even heat-sensitive surfaces wood, fabrics, even cardboard can be coated.

Mostaghimi and his team were awarded anAlliance Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)to explore the possibility applying the TWA method to create copper-embedded fabrics for manufacturing reusable face masks.

For their project, titledCopper Embedded Fabrics and Face masks for Rapid, Irreversible Destruction of COVID-19, Mostaghimi and his team are collaborating with Green Nano Technologies Inc., which will produce a pilot run of the copper embedded face masks.

Using our TWA spray technology, we will be able to produce copper-embedded masks at a marginally more expensive cost than N95 surgical face masks, saysPershin, CACTs centre manager.

Additionally, as copper degrades both DNA and RNA genetic material, the masks will have the added benefit of irreversibly inactivating all microbial pathogens, regardless of their mutation rates even after masks were disposed.

Various copper concentrations will be tested on the fabrics to help determine the optimal parameters for destroying the virus. The copper-embedded fabrics will be tested by Ringuette, whose team will use the fluid released from ruptured virus-infected bacteria, called bacteriophage lysates, to simulate SARS-CoV-2on the masks.

The research has potential health and safety benefits that could extend well beyond thecurrent pandemic. Affordable, reusable anti-viral PPE for health-care workers could mean a decrease in disease transmission in health-care facilities and a reduction associated infections.

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Copper-coated face masks could help slow transmission of COVID-19: U of T researchers - News@UofT

Evolution and epidemic spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil – Science

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The spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil

Brazil has been hard-hit by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. Candido et al. combined genomic and epidemiological analyses to investigate the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the country. By setting up a network of genomic laboratories using harmonized protocols, the researchers found a 29% positive rate for SARS-CoV-2 among collected samples. More than 100 international introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into Brazil were identified, including three clades introduced from Europe that were already well established before the implementation of NPIs and travel bans. The virus spread from urban centers to the rest of the country, along with a 25% increase in the average distance traveled by air passengers before travel bans, despite an overall drop in short-haul travel. Unfortunately, the evidence confirms that current interventions remain insufficient to keep virus transmission under control in Brazil.

Science, this issue p. 1255

Brazil currently has one of the fastest-growing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemics in the world. Because of limited available data, assessments of the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on this virus spread remain challenging. Using a mobility-driven transmission model, we show that NPIs reduced the reproduction number from >3 to 1 to 1.6 in So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Sequencing of 427 new genomes and analysis of a geographically representative genomic dataset identified >100 international virus introductions in Brazil. We estimate that most (76%) of the Brazilian strains fell in three clades that were introduced from Europe between 22 February and 11 March 2020. During the early epidemic phase, we found that SARS-CoV-2 spread mostly locally and within state borders. After this period, despite sharp decreases in air travel, we estimated multiple exportations from large urban centers that coincided with a 25% increase in average traveled distances in national flights. This study sheds new light on the epidemic transmission and evolutionary trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 lineages in Brazil and provides evidence that current interventions remain insufficient to keep virus transmission under control in this country.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel betacoronavirus with a 30-kb genome that was first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China (1, 2). SARS-CoV-2 was declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020. As of 12 July 2020, there were >12.5 million cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 561,000 deaths globally (3). The virus can be classified into two main phylogenetic lineages, A and B, which spread from Wuhan before strict travel restrictions were enacted (4, 5) and now cocirculate around the world (6). The case fatality ratio of SARS-CoV-2 infection has been estimated at between 1.2 and 1.6% (79), with substantially higher ratios in those >60 years of age (8). Some estimates suggest that 18 to 56% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is from asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals (1013), complicating epidemiological assessments and public health efforts to curb the pandemic.

Although the SARS-CoV-2 epidemics in several countries, including China, Italy, and Spain, have been brought under control through nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) (3), the number of SARS-CoV-2 cases and deaths in Brazil continues to increase (14) (Fig. 1A). As of 12 July 2020, Brazil had reported 1,800,827 SARS-CoV-2 cases, the second-largest number in the world, and 70,398 deaths. More than one-third of the cases (34%) in Brazil are concentrated in the southeast region, which includes So Paulo city (Fig. 1B), the worlds fourth-largest conurbation, where the first case in Latin America was reported on 25 February 2020 (15). Diagnostic assays for SARS-CoV-2 molecular detection were widely distributed across the regional reference centers of the national public health laboratory network from 21 February 2020 on (16, 17). However, several factors, including delays in reporting, changes in notification, and heterogeneous access to testing across populations, obfuscate the real-time assessment of virus transmission using SARS-CoV-2 case counts (15). Consequently, a more accurate measure of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Brazil is the number of reported deaths caused by severe acute respiratory infections (SARIs), which is provided by the Sistema nico de Sade (SUS) (18). Changes in the opportunity for SARS-CoV-2 transmission are strongly associated with changes in average mobility (1820) and can typically be measured by calculating the effective reproduction number, R, defined as the average number of secondary infections caused by an infected person. R > 1 indicates a growing epidemic, whereas R < 1 is needed to achieve a decrease in transmission.

(A) Cumulative number of SARS-CoV-2 reported cases (blue) and deaths (gray) in Brazil. (B) States are colored according to the number of cumulative confirmed cases by 30 April 2020. (C and D) R over time for the cities of So Paulo (C) and Rio de Janeiro (D). R values were estimated using a Bayesian approach incorporating the daily number of deaths and four variables related to mobility data (a social isolation index from Brazilian geolocation company InLoco and Google mobility indices for time spent in transit stations, parks, and the average between groceries and pharmacies, retail and recreational, and workspaces). Dashed horizontal line indicates R = 1. Gray area and geometric symbols show the times at which NPIs were implemented. BCIs of 50 and 95% are shown as shaded areas. The two-letter ISO 3166-1 codes for the 27 federal units in Brazil are provided in the supplementary materials.

We used a Bayesian semimechanistic model (21, 22) to analyze SARI mortality statistics and human mobility data to estimate daily changes in R in So Paulo city (12.2 million inhabitants) and Rio de Janeiro city (6.7 million inhabitants), the largest urban metropoles in Brazil (Fig. 1, C and D). NPIs in Brazil consisted of school closures implemented between 12 and 23 March 2020 across the countrys 27 federal units/states and store closures implemented between 13 and 23 March 2020. In So Paulo city, schools started closing on 16 March 2020 and stores closed 4 days later. At the start of the epidemics, we found R > 3 in So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and, concurrent with the timing of state-mandated NPIs, R values fell close to 1.

Analysis of R values after NPI implementation highlights several notable mobility-driven features. There was a period immediately after NPIs, between 21 and 31 March 2020, when R was consistently <1 in So Paulo city (Fig. 1C). However, after this initial decrease, the R value for So Paulo rose to >1 and increased through time, a trend associated with increased population mobility. This can be seen in the Google transit stations index, which rose from 60 to 52%, and by a decrease in the social isolation index from 54 to 47%. By 4 May 2020, we estimate R = 1.3 [95% Bayesian credible interval (BCI): 1.0 to 1.6] in both So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro cities (table S1). However, we note that there were instances in the previous 7 days when the 95% credible intervals for R included values <1, drawing attention to the fluctuations and uncertainty in the estimated R for both cities.

Early sharing of genomic sequences, including the first SARS-CoV-2 genome, Wuhan-Hu-1, released on 10 January (23), has enabled unprecedented global levels of molecular testing for an emerging virus (24, 25). However, despite the thousands of virus genomes deposited on public access databases, there is a lack of consistent sampling structure and there are limited data from Brazil (2628), which hampers accurate reconstructions of virus movement and transmission using phylogenetic analyses. To investigate how SARS-CoV-2 became established in the country, and to quantify the impact of NPIs on virus spatiotemporal spread, we tested a total of 26,732 samples from public and private laboratories using real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) assays and found 7944 (29%) to be positive for SARS-CoV-2. We then focused our sequencing efforts on generating a large and spatially representative genomic dataset with curated metadata to maximize the association between the number of sequences and the number of SARS-CoV-2 confirmed cases per state.

We generated 427 new SARS-CoV-2 genomes with >75% genome coverage from Brazilian samples collected between 5 March and 30 April 2020 (figs. S1 to S3 and data S1). For each state, the time between the date of the first reported case and the collection date of the first sequence analyzed in that state was only 4.5 days on average (Fig. 2A). For eight federal states, genomes were obtained from samples collected up to 6 days before the first case notifications. The genomes generated here were collected in 85 municipalities across 18 of 27 federal units spanning all regions in Brazil (Fig. 2A and fig. S2). Sequenced genomes were obtained from samples collected 4 days on average (median, range: 0 to 29 days) after the onset of symptoms and were generated in three laboratories using harmonized sequencing and bioinformatic protocols (table S2). When we include 63 additional available sequences from Brazil deposited in GISAID (29) (see data S1 and S2), we found the dataset to be representative of the spatial heterogeneity of the Brazilian epidemic. Specifically, the number of genomes per state strongly correlated with SARI SARS-CoV-2 confirmed cases and SARI cases with unknown etiology per state (n = 490 sequences from 21 states, Spearmans correlation, = 0.83; Fig. 2A). This correlation varied from 0.70 to 0.83 when considering SARI cases and deaths caused by SARS-CoV-2 and SARI cases and deaths from unknown etiology (fig. S4). Most (n = 485/490) Brazilian sequences belong to SARS-CoV-2 lineage B, with only five strains belonging to lineage A (two from Amazonas, one from Rio Grande do Sul, one from Minas Gerais, and one from Rio de Janeiro; data S1 and fig. S5 show detailed lineage information for each sequence). Moreover, we used an in silico assessment of diagnostic assay specificity for Brazilian strains (n = 490) to identify potential mismatches in some assays targeting these strains. We found that the forward primers of the Chinese CDC and Hong Kong University nucleoprotein-targeting RT-qPCR may be less appropriate for use in Brazil than other diagnostic assays, for which few or no mismatches were identified (fig. S6 and table S3). The impact of these mismatches on the sensitivity of these assays should be confirmed experimentally. If sensitivity is affected, then the use of duplex RT-qPCR assays that concurrently target different genomic regions may help in the detection of viruses with variants in primer- or probe-binding regions.

(A) Dumbbell plot showing the time intervals between date of collection of sampled genomes, notification of first cases, and first deaths in each state. Red lines indicate the lag between the date of collection of first genome sequence and first reported case. The key for the two-letter ISO 3166-1 codes for Brazilian federal units (or states) are provided in the supplementary materials. (B) Spearmans rank correlation between the number of SARI SARS-CoV-2 confirmed and SARI cases with unknown etiology against the number of sequences for each of the 21 Brazilian states included in this study (see also fig. S4). Circle sizes are proportional to the number of sequences for each federal unit. (C) Interval between the date of symptom onset and the date of sample collection for the sequences generated in this study.

We estimated maximum likelihood and molecular clock phylogenies for a global dataset with a total of 1182 genomes sampled from 24 December 2019 to 30 April 2020 (root-to-tip genetic distance correlation with sampling dates, r2 = 0.53; Fig. 3A and fig. S7). We inferred a median evolutionary rate of 1.13 103 (95% BCI: 1.03 to 1.23 103) substitutions per site per year using an exponential growth coalescent model, equating to 33 changes per year on average across the virus genome. This is within the range of evolutionary rates estimated for other human coronaviruses (3033). We estimate the date of the common ancestor (TMRCA) of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to around mid-November 2019 (median = 19 November 2019, 95% BCI: 26 October 2019 to 6 December 2019), which is consistent with recent findings (34, 35).

(A) Time-resolved maximum clade credibility phylogeny of 1182 SARS-CoV-2 sequences, 490 of which are from Brazil (salmon) and 692 from outside of Brazil (blue). The largest Brazilian clades are highlighted by gray boxes (Clade 1, Clade 2, and Clade 3). Inset shows a root-to-tip regression of genetic divergence against dates of sample collection. Red tip corresponds to the first reported case in Brazil. (B) Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 import events in Brazil. Dates of international and national (between federal states) migration events were estimated from virus genomes using a phylogeographic approach. The first phase was dominated by virus migrations from outside of Brazil, whereas the second phase was marked by virus spread within Brazil. Dashed vertical lines correspond to the mean posterior estimate for migration events from outside of Brazil (blue) and within Brazil (red). (C) Locally estimated scatterplot smoothing of the daily number of international (blue) and national (red) air passengers in Brazil in 2020. T0, date of first reported case in Brazil (25 February 2020).

Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the majority of the Brazilian genomes (76%, n = 370/490) fell into three clades, hereafter referred to as Clade 1 (n = 186/490, 38% of Brazilian strains), Clade 2 (n = 166, 34%), and Clade 3 (n = 18/490, 4%) (Fig. 3A and figs. S8 and S9), which were largely in agreement with those identified in a phylogenetic analysis using 13,833 global genomes. The most recent common ancestors of the three main Brazilian clades (Clades 1 to 3) were dated from 28 February (21 February to 4 March 2020) (Clade 1), 22 February (17 to 24 February 2020) (Clade 2), to 11 March (9 to 12 March 2020) (Clade 3) (Fig. 3A and fig. S10). This indicates that community-driven transmission was already established in Brazil by early March, suggesting that international travel restrictions initiated after this period would have had limited impact. Brazilian Clade 1 is characterized by a nucleotide substitution in the spike protein (G25088T, numbering relative to GenBank reference NC_045512.2) and circulates predominantly in So Paulo state (n = 159, 85.4%; figs. S9 and S11). Clade 2 is defined by two nucleotide substitutions in ORF6 (T27299C) and nucleoprotein (T29148C); this is the most spatially widespread lineage, with sequences from a total of 16 states in Brazil. Clade 3 is concentrated in Cear state (n = 16, 89%) and falls in a global cluster with sequences mainly from Europe. In the Amazon region, where the epidemic is expanding rapidly (14, 22), we found evidence for multiple national and international introductions, with 37% (n = 7/19) of sequences from Par and Amazonas states clustering in Clade 1 and 32% (n = 6/19) in Clade 2.

Time-measured phylogeographic analyses revealed at least 102 (95% BCI: 95 to 109) international introductions of SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil (Fig. 3A and figs. S8 and S12). This represents an underestimate of the real number of introductions because we sequenced, on average, only one out of 200 confirmed cases. Most of these estimated introductions were directed to internationally well-connected states (36) such as So Paulo (36% of all imports), Minas Gerais (24%), Cear (10%), and Rio de Janeiro (8%) (fig. S12). We further assessed the contribution of international versus national virus lineage movement events through time (Fig. 3B). In the first phase of the epidemic, we found an increasing number of international introductions until 10 March 2020 (Fig. 2B). Limited available travel history data (15) suggested that these early cases were predominantly acquired from Italy (26%, n = 70 of 266 unambiguously identified country of infection) and the United States (28%, n = 76 of 266). After this initial phase, we found that the estimated number of international imports decreased concomitantly with the decline in the number of international passengers traveling to Brazil (Fig. 3, B and C, and S13). By contrast, despite the declines in the number of passengers traveling on national flights (Fig. 3C), we detected an increase in virus lineage movement events between Brazilian regions at least until early April 2020.

To better understand virus spread across spatiotemporal scales within Brazil, we used a continuous phylogeographic model that maps phylogenetic nodes to their inferred origin locations (37) (Fig. 4). We distinguished branches that remain within a state versus those that cross a state to infer the proportion of within-state versus between-state observed virus movement.

(A) Spatiotemporal reconstruction of the spread of Brazilian SARS-CoV-2 clusters containing more than two sequences during the first (left) and the second (right) epidemic phase (Fig. 3B). Circles represent nodes of the maximum clade credibility phylogeny and are colored according to their inferred time of occurrence. Shaded areas represent the 80% highest posterior density interval and depict the uncertainty of the phylogeographic estimates for each node. Solid curved lines denote the links between nodes and the directionality of movement. Sequences belonging to clusters with fewer than three sequences were also plotted on the map with no lines connecting them. Background population density for each municipality was obtained from the Brazilian Institute of Geography (https://www.ibge.gov.br/). See fig. S14 for details of virus spread in the southeast region. (B) Estimated number of within-state (or within a given federal unit) and between-state (or between federal units) virus migrations over time. Dashed lines indicate estimates obtained during the period of limited sampling (fig. S2). (C) Average distance in kilometers traveled by an air passenger per day in Brazil. The number of daily air passengers is shown in Fig. 3B. Light gray boxes indicate the starting dates of NPIs across Brazil.

We estimate that during the first epidemic phase, SARS-CoV-2 spread mostly locally and within state borders. By contrast, the second phase was characterized by long-distance movement events and the ignition of the epidemic outside of the southeast region of Brazil (Fig. 4A). Throughout the epidemic, we found that within-state virus lineage movement was, on average, 5.1-fold more frequent than between-state movement. Moreover, our data suggest that within-state virus spread and, to a lesser extent, between-state virus spread decreased after the implementation of NPIs (Fig. 4B). However, the more limited sampling after 6 April 2020 (see fig. S2) decreased inferred virus lineage movement to the present (Figs. 3B and 4B).

We found that the average route length traveled by passenger increased by 25% during the second phase of the epidemic (Fig. 4C) despite a concomitant reduction in the number of passengers flying within Brazil (Fig. 3C). The increase in the average route length after NPI implementation resulted from a larger reduction in the number of air passengers flying on shorter-distance journeys compared with those flying on longer-distance journeys. For example, we found an 8.8-fold reduction in the number of passengers flying in flight legs <1000 km, compared with a 4.4-fold reduction in those flying >2000 km (fig. S15). These findings emphasize the roles of within- and between-state mobility as a key driver of both local and interregional virus spread, with highly populated and well-connected urban conurbations in the southeast region acting as the main sources of virus exports within the country (fig. S12).

We provide a comprehensive analysis of SARS-CoV-2 spread in Brazil showing the importance of community- and nation-wide measures to control the COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil. Although NPIs initially reduced virus transmission and spread, the continued increase in the number of cases and deaths in Brazil highlights the urgent need to prevent future virus transmission by implementing rapid and accessible diagnostic screening, contact tracing, quarantining of new cases, and coordinated social and physical distancing measures across the country (38). With the recent relaxation of NPIs in Brazil and elsewhere, continued molecular, immunological, and genomic surveillance are required for real-time data-driven decisions. Our analysis shows how changes in mobility may affect global and local transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and demonstrates how combining genomic and mobility data can complement traditional surveillance approaches.

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Evolution and epidemic spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil - Science

A FURTHER STEP IN EVOLUTION – The Tribune

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IT is impossible to go through the Congress telegrams, whether those sent by the Associated Press or by our Special Representative, without having two convictions forced on ones mind, first, that the enthusiasm which characterises the present session of the Congress is something phenomenal, something wholly unlike what one notices at an ordinary session, and secondly that this enthusiasm centres round one single item on the agenda of the Congress, the subject of Non-co-operation. Nor is this a matter for surprise. As we have said already, Non-co-operation is in a sense the only subject before the present Congress. All the three other subjects resolve themselves into this one subject, because all of them represent what in official parlance are called settled facts, and in respect of all of them the real question before the Congress is whether it is to content itself with mere passing of customary resolutions of protest, or to take some more direct and more positive action. And the prevailing enthusiasm is solely due to the fact that in the opinion of the vast majority of Congressmen the time has come when the Congress can no longer content itself with the pursuit of past methods, when it must go forward and take one more definite and substantial step towards the realisation of national destiny. In the expressive words of the President, we have advanced beyond the last stage of very humble submission, have crossed the boundaries of respectful demand and have entered into the arena of backing our demands by vigorous and compelling action of a peaceful kind. In the equally expressive words of Sir Ashutosh Chaudhury, who proposed the forward election of Lala Lajpat Rai as President, there is no hide and seek in the matter. The Congress wants to take a further step in its evolutionary process.

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A FURTHER STEP IN EVOLUTION - The Tribune

From Flips to Clicks: The Evolution of Conducting Research Through Books vs. The Internet – Egyptian Streets

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From Flips to Clicks: The Evolution of Conducting Research Through Books vs. The Internet

Once upon a time, the internet had yet to exist and when one needed to conduct research of any sort, they had to solely rely on books heaps and piles of books.

Imagine being at school or university these days, being given an assignment that requires a lot of research in a certain subject or topic and having to rely solely on using the library and no, not the computers at the library, but the actual books at the library.

For most students these days, or more specifically those who fall under the demographic of millennials and Generation Z, having to conduct research solely through books might actually be unimaginable. Why go through the physical and time consuming process of skimming through piles of books, when the answers one could be looking for could literally be found just a click away?

That being said, however, there are undoubtedly pros and cons to each method of research. While searching for answers through the internet could be a lot faster and efficient, a lot of the time one will not be able to really go in depth on a certain subject or topic by solely relying on internet searches.

Researching Through the Internet

Google, its almost everyones go-to source for any sort of information one might be seeking. From specific questions on topics such as philosophy to those of a more minute scale such as asking about how to boil an egg Google always has the answer, or at least an answer that will stand out amongst a sea of many.

The internet truly is a marvel, and when thinking about the fact that one can access countless sources of information through the click or a button, it definitely puts things into perspective in terms of how far technology has advanced.

However as with most technological advances, as well as generally most things in life, nothing comes without downfalls of some sort.

As previously mentioned, although searching for something through the internet is faster and more efficient, it is not as reliable as trying to search for something through specific books, for example.

The internet is so vast and wide, that people will find themselves bombarded with such a wide variety of information, most of which may not be backed up by a sufficient amount of research, nor reliable sources.

Indeed, the internet can provide a lot in a short amount of time, but because of its wide reach and accessibility, this very fact also makes it its downfall; anyone these days can publish anything on the internet it doesnt make it accurate or reliable.

Researching Through Books

In todays fast-paced world, barely anyone has the patience or time to read, let alone skim, through books these days.

In addition to this, when it comes to conducting research through books, one must first also search for the most appropriate books that would best fit their subject or topic.

While this method may not seem time efficient these days, it may actually provide a lot more sufficient and reliable information for the topic of which one could be conducting research for.

The beauty of books that discuss certain topics, is that more often that not the person or author who wrote and published the book is a professional or academic with years of experience on the matter.

As such, the information gathered and placed into the book is a lot more reliable than a random internet search, because it consists of years of effort and studies all ultimately placed together in this one place.

However, it is worth keeping in mind that there are also many books published by people who lack credentials; it just may be slightly easier to point those out in book form than sources found online.

Also, more often than not, sources found on the internet may cite or suggest certain books for further reading and delving into the topic more deeply.

For this reason, and in order to truly provide fact-based research which is both reliable and unique, conducting research by skimming through certain books can make all the difference.

The Ultimate Prognosis

Perhaps the best thing to do when conducting any sort of research these days, would be to try to balance between searching for information through the internet as well as skimming through books.

The internet could be a great resource for simple background information; the sort of information one would include in a study or assignment that just slightly begins to touch the surface of a certain topic.

In order to delve deeper into a topic or subject however, to truly enrich the research one is conducting, academic or professional support through books that specifically tackle the topic at hand can tie everything together perfectly.

That being said, the next time one goes about conducting research of any sort, perhaps re-visiting physical books is worth a try.

A particularly great, and little known, resource that one can use in Egypt is the Egyptian Knowledge Bank. The Egyptian Knowledge Bank acts as a digital library, thriving with numerous diverse resources, exclusively for Egyptian citizens.

According to their official website, The Egyptian Knowledge Bank grants all Egyptians from all ages access to the largest amount of knowledge, cultural and scientific content whether they be basic, applied, technology, human or management sciences. Even public cultural books, including books targeting children, to be used through all computers, as well as smart phones and tablets around the country. One can access this resource by using their national ID number.

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From Flips to Clicks: The Evolution of Conducting Research Through Books vs. The Internet - Egyptian Streets

The evolution of the urban SUV – CarsGuide

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Most people associate SUVs as a modern phenomenon, a 21st Century trend born out of a burgeoning middle class with more disposable income but dramatically less leisure time because of our always-on, constantly-connected 24/7 lives.

Theyre more than mere transportation. If we can pretend we live an adventurous and carefree lifestyle, even to just help us get through the boredom of the everyday commute, then why not buy into the fantasy?

Cocooned up high in your own little escape-mobile, the SUVs psychological appeal, the sheer mental getaway it offers, is actually pretty profound when you stop to think about it.

The thing is, though, the first cars of a century ago were exactly that as well a break away from the horse and cart, opening up the entire world and its endless possibilities.

Like SUVs, landmark models like the Ford Model T were high-riding and rugged because they were essentially motorised carriages minus the horse, built to clear rutted and potholed tracks and bushland, as sealed roads were few and far between. They were the original crossovers!

Of course, as the road network flourished, cars became lower, and so evolved as lighter and less indestructible monocoque-bodied sedans, coupes, wagons and convertibles. If people needed tough go-anywhere vehicles, their choices were limited to 4x4s like the Land Rover, Jeep and Nissan Patrol. There was clear demarcation.

Then the Suzuki Vitara happened. Earlier attempts like the Matra-Simca Rancho of the 1970s (in Europe) tried but failed to meld a compact and affordable leisure car from commercial-vehicle applications, inspired by the earlier Suzuki Jimny/Sierra, but the former was too offbeat and the latter too off-road focused.

The Matra-Simca Rancho tried, but failed to meld a compact and affordable leisure car from commercial-vehicle applications.

The Vitara, however, heralded a new dawn. Yes, it had a ladder-frame chassis, but it was also a smart, modern wagon with refinement and class, promising comfort, security, economy and ease.

The urban SUV was born and the world went gaga for it.

The Vitara heralded a new dawn.

Inspired by the Suzuki's success, Toyota went one further, cobbling together a similarly sized and proportioned high-riding car-like monocoque body, using Corolla, Carina/Camry and even Celica bits underneath.

If the Vitara kicked down the SUV door, that first RAV4 ripped the roof open. Almost every carmaker has since applied the same formula to its passenger cars, creating new segments across the price spectrum in the process. Nothing was the same again.

After the first RAV4 nothing was the same again.

Such history is essential in understanding how and why urban SUVs have evolved their own design forms, from boxy and utilitarian down-scaled clones of larger and 4x4s remember when RAV4s and Honda CR-Vs carried their spare wheels behind bulky side-hinged tailgates? to raised hatch-cum-wagon crossovers with a total urban focus. Form over function became key.

The first Nissan Qashqai of 2006 known as the Dualis in Australia and Japan was another breakthrough. Slightly smaller than a RAV4 and yet priced only a bit above something like a mid-range Toyota Corolla, it struck gold globally by anticipating consumers attraction to SUVs while addressing their concerns of excess size, cost, consumption and effort when driving and parking in more confined spaces. People began to abandon small and medium-sized cars in droves for this sort of SUV.

Then lightning struck twice for Nissan with the Juke.

The first Nissan Qashqai was known as the Dualis in Australia.

A bolt from the blue when unveiled in 2010, it looked more like an alien motor-show concept than a high-volume production SUV, with muscular hips, bulging eyes for headlights and a coupe-like hunched-back silhouette all melted within a hotpot of in-your-face attitude. You could even see a clear family resemblance to the Nissan 370Z sports car... in an SUV! Like BMWs Mini, but jacked up, the Juke was aimed at city slickers and urbanites seeking to make a statement.

Sales went stratospheric, especially among the younger demographic who would otherwise not be seen dead driving an SUV, sending rival manufacturers scurrying back to their styling studios in retaliation.

Yes, the Jukes divisive design seemed to have deliberately come at the cost of effective rear-seat packaging, a decently-sized boot and unimpeded vision when parking, but at least it wasnt a boring wallflower facsimile of every small boxy hatch out there. It was the miniskirt of mini crossovers, banishing the boring box-on-wheels approach as adhered to by the likes of other smaller SUVs of the time, like the Hyundai ix35.

Crucially, Nissans masterstroke was to make the Jukes interior as bold as its outer skin, with vibrant trim, a (for the era) large central screen and dash layout reminiscent of ghetto-blasters of the 1980s. It rode the wave of multimedia connectivity as an extension of your smartphones functionality, prioritising communication and audio accessibility. Never mind the cramped space, firm suspension and noisy ride the anti-establishment Juke was literally another form of boombox.

Ultimately, what the smallest Nissan SUV helped do was create a design and lifestyle-driven alternative to small hatchbacks and sedans, even if the 2010-2019 first-generation series was a little extreme in looks and packaging. Affordability. Easy access. High seating. Ample ground clearance. A sense of adventure.

The world has since been flooded with imitators.

Mazdas response was barely any larger or practical, but the CX-3 is in no way as visually confronting; now its Australias best-selling small SUV.

Honda, which beat the Juke to market by a dozen years with the 1998 HR-V (but dropped the ball with bizarrely hearse-on-stilts-like styling) infused visual elements of its '80s Prelude and Integra coupe classics for the far-more successful 2015 HR-V follow-up.

And others, such as the Hyundai Kona, Citroen C3 AirCross, Renault Captur, Peugeot 2008, Ford Puma, Toyota Yaris Cross, Volkswagen T-Cross and Skoda Kamiq, also all owe a debt to the breakout Juke.

Ironically, these have helped the 2020 Juke II evolve into a larger, more refined and more comfortable urban SUV proposition.

Finally, while Australia still lags behind, electrification is fast becoming the norm in Europe, Japan, Korea, China and North America, with urban SUVs well placed to make the most of the changing world.

How? Basically they're built tall, meaning battery packs can be incorporated within the vehicles platform without compromising headroom or boot capacity, while also providing a lower centre of gravity for more secure control at speed. Similarly, electric motors can drive each axle as required for lightweight all-wheel drive, as seen in 2020s runaway success story of 2020 the RAV4 Hybrid.

The Toyota's unprecedented popularity clearly demonstrates that consumers are ready for electrification, as they address usual SUV shortfalls such as high fuel consumption and top-heavy handling. Ford offers a Puma hybrid overseas, the next Qashqai and future Juke variants will likely adopt the conceptually similar e-Power systems, and both the coming Yaris Cross and 2022 Corolla Cross will mirror their RAV4 big-brother with petrol-electric availability.

The evolution of the small SUV continues unbridled. Watch this space for what happens next.

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The evolution of the urban SUV - CarsGuide

AR Wallace Is Evolution’s Last Man Standing – Discovery Institute

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Image: Alfred Russel Wallace, via Wikimedia Commons.

American zoologist T. D. A. Cockerell, writing for The Dialon April 16, 1911, reviewed Alfred Russel Wallaces then-recently releasedThe World of Life. He wrotecautiously but approvingly.

Being thus a work of philosophy as well as science, it necessarily covers much debatable ground. Those of us who are not prepared to follow Dr. Wallace in all the intricacies of his personal faith, may nevertheless feel very strongly that he has done well in bringing forward his solution of the riddle of the ages, the result of more than fifty years of thought.

Indeed Cockerells confidence is confirmed today more than ever. A new edition of Wallace book, Intelligent Evolution: How WallacesWorld of LifeChallenged Darwinism, is out now, edited by science historian Michael Flannery. In his Foreword to the new book, William A. Dembski notes how current scholarship is demolishing the neo-Darwinian paradigm and confirming Wallace at almost every turn. Dembski says that staunch Darwinian defender [Jerry]Coynes one going theory may be steadilygoing away.

When we look at that first generation of modern evolutionists, from Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley to John Tyndall and Herbert Spencer, only Wallaces postulation of an Overruling Intelligence to explain the complexities of humanity and nature has stood the test of time. To understand his enduring presence in biology as well as natural theology,The World of Lifeis indispensable. Once his thought is placed in context and illuminated by the latest research and historiography, as it is inIntelligent Evolution, youll understand why Wallace remains evolutions last man standing. Order yourcopytoday.

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AR Wallace Is Evolution's Last Man Standing - Discovery Institute

‘Homegrown’: An Insight Into the Evolution of Music – berkeleyhighjacket.com

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One of the best rock albums released recently is 46 years old. Though Neil Youngs latest album, Homegrown, came out in June of 2020, it was actually recorded in the early 1970s. Young wrote the album after his breakup with actress Carrie Snodgress and held off on releasing it for close to a half a century to spare himself the pain. That same emotional struggle is apparent in the album and makes an intense emotional listen.

Beyond being a fantastic record, Homegrown is a time capsule from a different musical era. In late August of 1973, around the time the album was created, the number one song on the Cash Box Top 100 was Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney and Wings. The number one song on the BillBoard Top 100 today is WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. Essentially nothing on the current charts is anything that would be considered rock music. Instead, the songs in todays top charts are from the R&B, hip hop, rap, and/or pop genres. Seeing the stylistic differences between past and present music, it can seem that there is a large musical gap between then and now. Nonetheless, saying rock music is dead would be false. Rock shares a very similar history and ancestry to rap, hip hop, and R&B. Rather than die out, the rock & roll of the past has evolved into the pop, hip hop, and R&B of today.

Rock, as a genre, has never meant just one thing and has never been easy to define; perhaps it is indefinable. However, all rock shares a derivation from African American jazz, rhythm, blues, and country music from the 1950s. It usually involves the use of drums, one or more guitars (often electric), a bass, a keyboard or piano, and some sort of vocals. Though it is typically played in a 4/4 time signature, there are forms of blues rock in 12/8. It also shares a similar verse/chorus structure to its sister genre, pop music. These vague guidelines with innumerable twists and variations are what defines rock music, a style which dominated popular music from sometime in the 60s through the 80s and into the 90s, when rap and hip hop took over by storm.

Hip hop and rock have more musical similarities than it may seem at first. They are both typically built on backbeats in 4/4 and are largely centered around the human voice. Both can be traced back to the rhythm and blues and are both, in a sense, subgenres of this style. The two styles are sometimes bridged with artists like the Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C, and Rage Against the Machine, who walk the line between rock and hip hop. Artists like them show how closely connected hip hop and rock are. Today, bands like Death Grips continue to exist somewhere between the worlds of rock and hip hop, demonstrating that these genres are intertwined by nature.

Seeing as these two major genres in addition to funk, soul, and R&B all have their roots in the same place, it can be inferred that rock did not start falling out of the Top 100 charts because its popularity was diminishing, rather, the genre shifted and changed into something new, as music has always done.

Though the success of Homegrown may seem like it came out of left field, it actually serves as an indicator to how related the music of today really is to that of the past. Hearing this album shouldnt be a sad reminder of something dead and gone, rather an insight into the constantly changing and evolving multi-laned world of music. In essence, Youngs album from 1970 is a wonderful reminder of musical traditions.

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'Homegrown': An Insight Into the Evolution of Music - berkeleyhighjacket.com

New York Islanders: The Evolution of Matt Martin – Empire Sports Media

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The New York Islanders drafted Matt Martin in the 5th round of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft. Since then, Matt Martin has been the staple/identity of Islanders hockey. Hard-hitting, physical forechecking, and a lot of chirping. Martin has grown as a player since being drafted. He went from a head-hunting enforcer to a get in front of the net grinder. Not only has this change impacted the Islanders positively, but also added years to his career.

Young Matt Martin played a lot like Ross Johnston does. Both of them are big bodies who stuck up for their best players. For Martin, it was John Tavares, for Johnston, it is Mat Barzal. Dont get me wrong, Martin is still an enforcer, but hes an offensive enforcer.

Barry Trotz has made Martin an offensive threat for the first time in his whole career. Matt Martin currently has four playoff goals, and all of them were clutch goals. Having a 4th liner who can score along with creating opportunities through the forecheck is huge. He can still deliver the big hits too, but not as frequent. My only criticism is that he takes bad penalties at bad times. Too many stick infractions in the closing minutes of the third. Other than that, Martin is a great player.

Sadly, Matt Martins contract is over with the Islanders after the season ends. Since the Islanders have to sign Mat Barzal, Devon Toews, and Ryan Pulock, the chance that Martin gets resigned is very slim. I would keep Martin over Johnston, though.

Theres no reason to break up that 4th line chemistry just because theres a younger version of young Matt Martin. Martin should command $2-$2.5 million in free agency, close to Johnstons contract. Im not saying get rid of Johnston for Martin, but if thats how it has to happen, thats how it must happen. The 4th line is crucial to the Islanders success, its the entire identity of who the Islanders are. The Islanders must keep Martin somehow.

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New York Islanders: The Evolution of Matt Martin - Empire Sports Media

Darwin’s apostles and evolutionary science: fighting fake news – Albany Times Union

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Dr. Abby Hafer has her doctorate in zoology from Oxford University and currently teaches at Curry College. She has authored the book Unintelligent Design, among others, and claims to be famous for testicles. (Not her own; see below.) I heard her recent talk about what todays fighters against fake news can learn from Darwins apostles.

She started by suggesting that pre-Trump we could not have imagined an American president establishing a bizarre, counter-factual, evidence-free narrative, yet succeeding in gulling much of the population. But Welcome to my world, Hafer said every evolutionary biologist has always had to deal with such an environment of factual denialism. Objective reality exists! she insisted, steadfastly disregarding all the evidence to the contrary.

The Darwin apostles Hafer discussed were scientists who fought, against powerful entrenched interests, to gain acceptance for the concept of evolution by natural selection. After a long hard campaign they succeeded to a great degree (despite pockets of resistance, notably including a high proportion of Americans). Hafer cited publication, in 1889, of a book, Lux Mundi, in which notables in the Church of England discussed reconciling their faith with evolution which they already assumed was true.

John William Draper was a scientist who authored History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science in 1874. The lesson Hafer took from his efforts: dont quail from battling fundamentalist religion, but work with religious people wherever its possible.

Alfred Russel Wallace was of course the guy who figured out evolution at about the same time as Darwin. Darwin had long feared publishing would cause a big backlash. But Wallace, Hafer said, struck a different kind of terror into Darwin: not getting credit. So he finally finished up the book hed been working on for two decades. (He and Wallace actually reached an agreement about public presentation of the theory. In this negotiation Darwin had much back-up from colleagues. I recall one writer saying they took Wallace to the cleaners.)

Joseph Hooker was one scientist who had long actually fought against the idea of biological evolution. But ultimately, he said, the conviction was forced upon an unwilling convert. He couldnt fight the facts. That was intellectual integrity.

Darwins greatest proponent was Thomas Henry Huxley. Hafer discussed his lengthy battle with Richard Owen, who maintained that brain differences ruled out any close connection between humans and apes. Huxley showed Owen was just wrong on the anatomical facts: Before I have done with that mendacious humbug I will nail him out like a kite to a barn door, an example to all evil doers.

Huxley was indefatigable, working the social media of his day newspapers. Letters to the editor, and replies, were a very big thing.

One audience member remarked that many people who most need to hear such messages refuse to listen. Hafer acknowledged this, and how a lot of these issues have become politicized. But she held that persistent efforts to debate such issues, vigorously battling error, in the public square, can have an effect. And Americans are actually leaving evangelical Christianity in droves, indeed angry because they feel theyve been lied to.

A point she emphasized was that to overcome biases you have to tailor the message to engage people. Mention was made of Galileos experiments with the motions of balls, illustrating his ideas in a visually unarguable way. Hafer also pointed to her own work on how the human body actually shows un-intelligent design.* A prime example is testicles, hanging vulnerably outside the body cavity, whereas many other animals have them safely inside. Its because human testicles have to be kept cooler. (I asked whether there was any connection between testicles and Galileos balls and she gave a straight-faced answer.) Anyhow, the point was that when you start talking about testicles, people sit up and listen.

She also said the current pandemic is a golden opportunity to make people grasp the importance of being serious toward science. And the virus, of course, evolved.If it werent for evolution, thered never be any new diseases.

Hafer avowed that we are struggling today not only for the soul of this nation but for its brain.Its integrity. Scientists are on the front lines of this battle.

She channeled Martin Niemoller: First they came for the evolutionary biologists . . . .

* Heres my earlier discussion of that: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/unintelligent-design--why-evolution-explains-the-human-body-and-intelligent-design-does-not/

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Darwin's apostles and evolutionary science: fighting fake news - Albany Times Union

The Evolution of Wesley Crusher – Star Trek

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One of my favorite characters on The Next Generation is Wesley Crusher. Ive always been a fan of the underdog, and Wesley fits that bill perfectly, a prodigy on board a ship of Starfleets best and brightest. Hes more than just a wonder kid I found him to be one of the most complex and well-developed characters on the series, with his arc being one of the more fascinating journeys on a series which has several great ones. The series presents Wesley as someone who represents the best ideals of a Starfleet officer candidate, a keen study with a passionate interest in science. However, he could sometimes struggle under pressure of high expectations placed upon him from an early age. It was only towards the end of the series when we finally see that Wesley feels content in leaving Starfleet to realize his goals.

Evolution does a good job at establishing that Wesley isnt a perfect person, and has plenty of learning to do on his path that would see him join The Traveler in Journeys End. He doesnt always get everything right and whats more, time after time throughout the series hes constantly placed in environments where adults are too busy for him, constantly overlook his skills, or are too overbearing.

In Journeys End Wesleys mother, Dr. Beverly Crusher, returns to the ship and finds it hard to reconnect with him, leading the young man to seek solace elsewhere in Dr. Stubbs. The subtle teleplay from Michael Piller presents Dr. Stubbs and Wesleys other role model figure, Captain Picard, as alternatives to one another, looking at the impact both would have as surrogate fathers for a teenager without one. Whilst the dedicated scientist is clearly imperfect and flawed, hes the same sort of person that Wesley could end up as in the years to come if he doesnt keep his humanity in check. Its easy to see why Dr. Stubbs is initially appealing, as he comes across initially as an alternative to Picard, their characters share a mutual hunger for science and the unknown whilst their passion for baseball is incredibly heartfelt.

However, Dr. Stubbs lets his ego consume him to the point where it puts lives on the Enterprise in danger, placing Wesley in a situation where he must realize that his own mistakes may make him responsible. The fact that he might be struggling is hard for him to admit, and his scenes with his mother and Guinan keep him grounded and steer him back towards the right track.. Its these moments that separate him from Dr. Stubbs, keeping his influence restricted to a cautionary tale and humanizing Wesley without losing his appeal as a character.

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His struggles and hard work pay off consistently over the series, but not without great cost as we see him pursue his Starfleet Academy dreams. Coming of Age and Mnage Troi arent afraid to show Wesley failing, showing he has no easy route towards his ambition. Coming of Age sees his first attempt at passing the Starfleet entrance exams fail; but ultimately he sacrifices those dreams in Mnage Troi where he comes into his own and saves key crewmembers of the Enterprise instead of taking part in the entrance examination. He loses the opportunity to enter the Academy, but is in turn promoted to the rank of a full Ensign. Given his achievements so far in the series, it feels completely earned.

In Final Mission Wesley finally joins Starfleet Academy, but only after more hard work. After being stranded on a desert planet as a direct result of a mining shuttle accident, Wesley is forced into a situation where he has to work to save Picards life after the death of Captain Dirgo. Its an episode that goes from strength to strength, highlighting how much the friendship between Wesley and Picard has evolved from their early days of animosity, with their farewell being one of the more tender and emotionally charged moments of the series. Their bond is heavy and sincere, working as much as a stepping stone for Picards development as it does for Wesley, with Picard reminded of his own youth and mortality as he spends most of the episode completely reliant on Wesleys help. Its a touching moment when Picard admits that he doesnt see Wesley as just a child anymore, but as someone who he envies, being just at the beginning of the adventure.

StarTrek.com

The scenes between Picard and Wesley in Final Mission act as a driving force for the younger man in the rest of the series. The Game sees Wesley in his element again, saving the ship from an addictive game consuming every member of the crew with the aid of Ensign Robin Lefler. Its a classic hangout episode of the series thats just so much fun to watch, and revels in once again placing Wesley directly in his element, while The First Duty takes him out of his comfort zone again almost immediately and puts him in one of the most difficult positions that any crew member has had to be in. In The First Duty, Wesley he faces consequences for his actions that stay with him until the end of his time on the series.

The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, is a good mantra to have, one of the best but it can be challenging in practice. The audience has become so used to situations where Wesley ends up saving the day to the point where he thinks hes almost invincible himself, which is a trait shared with the rest of Nova Squadron who believe they can do nothing wrong. But the tragedy is that they are falible. They lack the experience of actual officers and, more importantly, they lack the knowledge about when not to act. This leads to heartbreaking consequences and the death of a squadron member in an easily-preventable training accident as their world comes crashing down around them. Forced into a position where his training group are covering up their roles in the death of a crewmember, Wesley is faced with an uncomfortable choice: does he take the hard, but honorable route in betraying his friends and jeopardizing not just his future but theirs? Or does he lie, and take the easy way out?

If Final Mission was about reinforcing the relationship between Picard and Wesley, The First Duty is the episode that almost tore it apart. Wesleys relationship with both Beverly and Picard is placed completely under the spotlight when they learn the truth. Ill never not find it devastating when his mother realizes that Wesley might actually be lying about his involvement in the incident. Coupled with Picards speech that eventually sees him make a good, but tough call in admitting what really happened in the training exercise, The First Duty demonstrates its capability to deliver truly poignant moments that prove to be character-defining, leaving Wesley to cope with consequences that affect his entire career.

StarTrek.com

Wesley is still living with the fallout on his mind in his last appearance in Journeys End, where its clear from the moment that he returns to the Enterprise that he is unsettled with his role in Starfleet Academy and wants a new challenge. His potential remains unfulfilled, until he joins up with The Traveler, who wishes to mentor him and provide the answers that he needs to decide his future. For too long he has been following in his fathers shoes instead of taking his own path in life, and The Traveler gives him the chance to do just that with an entire universe to explore. In the case of Journeys End, the title feels like a misnomer. Instead of an ending, for Wesley Crusher, its the start of something new.

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Milo (he/him) is a critic from the UK who regularly reviews TV, movies and comics. You can find him on twitter at @Milo_AFC.

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The Evolution of Wesley Crusher - Star Trek

Dr. Pennell on the Evolution of Targeting HER2 in Lung Cancer – OncLive

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Nathan A. Pennell, MD, PhD, discusses the evolution of targeting HER2 in lung cancer.

Nathan A. Pennell, MD, PhD,an associate professor in theDepartment of Medicine and director of the Lung Cancer Medical Oncology Program at theTaussig Cancer Institute of Cleveland Clinic,discusses the evolution of targeting HER2 in lung cancer.

HER2 is a target that has been around for a long time because it is used routinely in the treatment of patients with breast cancer, says Pennell. In lung cancer, it has beenrecognizedthatHER2mutations in the HER2 tyrosine kinase domain have been present in the disease for a long time; roughly2% of lung adenocarcinomas haveHER2mutations, adds Pennell.

Unfortunately, thecurrent data on targeting HER2 haveproven to bedisappointing, according to Pennell. TKIs that target EGFR and HER2, such as afatinib (Gilotrif), have had trials,but have demonstrated relatively marginal efficacy and an effect that is short lived. However, that seems to have changed recently with the emergence of the antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).

ADCs have shown demonstrated promising efficacy in phase 2 trials withHER2-mutant lung cancer. Over the past few years,sometrials examining these agents in lung cancer have been presented at medical meetings.For example, findings froma phase 2 trialwithado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla; T-DM1) were reported,and this agent is already available for useinHER2-positive breast cancer.The agentwas examinedina cohort of patients withHER2-mutant lung cancerandwas found to elicit an impressive overall response rate of44%with a promising duration of control, says Pennell. This agent was probably used off label for HER2-positive lung cancer after these data were presented, Pennell adds.

Then, an oral presentation was delivered during the2020 ASCO Virtual Scientific Meetingon the phase 2 DESTINY-Lung01trial, which evaluated the ADC fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (Enhertu) inHER2-mutated lung cancer. The agent showed an impressive response rate of 61.9%, which is comparable with what is expectedwith otherEGFR inhibitors inEGFR-mutant lung cancer.Trastuzumab deruxtecan also hadan estimated progression-free survival of 14 months. For the first time,the field is starting to see targeted drugs for this patient population that mirror targeted drugs that have been developed for other molecular alterations in lung cancer, concludes Pennell.

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Dr. Pennell on the Evolution of Targeting HER2 in Lung Cancer - OncLive

Teachers Day 2020: An Evolution in the teaching techniques and opportunity for the personal growth of the teachers – The Financial Express

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By Rajeev Tiwari and Anurag Gupta

COVID19 has unexpectedly led to a tough time for People, Companies, Businesses across the globe. But it is just another test of the strong resoluteness and unwavering attitude of human beings of not losing the hope even in the most adverse times, and a testimonial to the firm desire in our quest to find a tangible working solution in the most adverse conditions. If simply put, it is an eye opener for the world to see how mankind can stay strong even during the worst of times and walk towards the path of light when all they can find is darkness.

COVID19 has proven once again that the Teacher Community can fight all odds so as to deliver the best in class teaching methodology to their beloved students. They are willing to walk that extra mile to ensure that their students dont suffer a loss even during a situation which has led half the world into trauma. So first of all, a Grand Salute to every Teacher in the World.

In India, around March-April 2020 every student, parents were worried that how the education of the students will proceed in these tough times, but the Teaching community was very quick to adopt a blend of Digital Technologies and give it a personalized touch so as to deliver the best in class education to the students. They made sure they adapted all the necessary strategies and techniques which would not only be helpful for the students but also be a method that can be followed even when things turn normal. Teaching online is one of the techniques, that not every teacher was accustomed with, but learned during the pandemic only to provide the best of education to their students.

In these tough times, Digital Technologies that have proved very useful-

1. Conducting Online Classes via Zoom, MS Team, Google Meet

2. Online Virtual Class environment Lot of companies in EdTech space like Google Class, ClomoLMS, etc have come with Integrated Solution to offer End to Solution Covering Attendance Tracking, Lessons, Assignment, Quizzes, Gradebook and offering End to Online Class Delivery along with tracking students progress like in a normal offline mode.

3. Conducting Webinar and Tech Capsules Online to students, teachers so as to give an exposure to new trends to the stakeholders via an Interactive Webinar and Panel Discussions.

All these offer a great opportunity to teachers for their own personal growth and a new learning path that extends a possibility of adopting the best of Digital Technologies for Education Delivery, Using AI and Analytics to track down the growth of the students and offer a data based Career Progression Path and at the same time integrating it with apersonal touch, ethos, compassion, wisdom and ethics of a great Teacher.

(The authors are Founder at STEMROBO and Tinker Coders, Views expressed are their own.)

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Teachers Day 2020: An Evolution in the teaching techniques and opportunity for the personal growth of the teachers - The Financial Express

‘A villain of the times’: The evolution of Zozobra – KOAT New Mexico

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Old Man Gloom is 96 years old and he still looks great. But he never looks the same. Each year he grows taller, wears new clothes or has a different hair style. The evolution of Old Man Gloom is ever changing.Hes one of the most notorious characters in New Mexico. You can call him a chameleon of the times. I feel in love with the guy. I would say he was my first boyfriend, said Zozobra Deputy Event Chair Judith Moir.Black and white photos show Zozobra in the early years and key points in our history. As the years go on, Old Man Gloom becomes the monsters we need him to be. He becomes the villain of America. All the planning and design for Zozobra is done around the decade of his history, said Moir.In 1982, the marionette has buttons along his top and a black belt. Then two years later, in 1984, he ditched some of his buttons for a bow tie, which would become his iconic look in the years to come. Then in 1985 and 1986, Old Man Gloom had orange hair.Then the '90s Zozobra rocked yellow locks along with his bow tie. Fast forward to the early 2000s. Old Man Zoom donned several looks. The easiest change to see was his hair, from white to purple to orange. Other than the fact that has gotten bigger, I think the biggest change that we have done was in 2014, we added the decades project, said Moir.The decades project starts with the 1920s and is a way to highlight each decade as we get closer to Old Man Glooms 100th birthday. He was a snidely whiplash guy with a big mustache. Then we moved on to the '30s. He was old, bald and fat because that was the depression era. Zozobra had a little white hair left on this head and one button on his top.Then came 2016. The '40s we have the WWII era. That was a really big deal for us. That was really important because we were able to mark the 75th anniversary of the holocaust, said Moir. The marionette was dressed for the occasion with his double-breasted top, a fedora and a black tie.Part of the decades project is to teach kids about their past, not just Zozobra's past but what happened in New Mexico, what happened in the world, said Moir. That same year, the night before the event, a candlelight vigil was held to pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Then in 2017, it was all about honoring the '50s. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and I would like to say he was father knows worst, instead of father knows best, said Moir. Zozobra had red hair to match his red nails.Then came the '60s. We really rolled out the entire hippie era 3:42 he tried to give the peace sign, but because he is Zozobra he really couldn't do that, said Moir.2018 was all groovy baby, with staff dressed in tie-dye as Old Man Gloom wore a bolo tie and had silver hair.Then last year, in 2019, disco was out to play. Coming in at 50 feet, 6 inches tall, it was all about the John Travolta look. Zozobra wore a white suit, gold medallion and blonde hair. His eyes were the memorable avocado green color and his lips were burnt orange. That was the first time his lips have changed color.2020 2 was slated to take us back to the '80s, but that is on hold until next year. Event organizers want this years focus to be the coronavirus. Zozobra will not wear a mask. Instead this show will honor first responders like our health care workers. The big question is, what will them marionette look like? His gray hair will take on the look of the virus itself, with orange pingpong balls and red hair scrunchies. His cuff-links will resemble murder hornets and they will be dipped in gold to bring out his formal attire. Last but not least, the buttons on his jacket will be stamped with the year 2020.

Old Man Gloom is 96 years old and he still looks great. But he never looks the same. Each year he grows taller, wears new clothes or has a different hair style. The evolution of Old Man Gloom is ever changing.

Hes one of the most notorious characters in New Mexico. You can call him a chameleon of the times. I feel in love with the guy. I would say he was my first boyfriend, said Zozobra Deputy Event Chair Judith Moir.

Black and white photos show Zozobra in the early years and key points in our history. As the years go on, Old Man Gloom becomes the monsters we need him to be. He becomes the villain of America. All the planning and design for Zozobra is done around the decade of his history, said Moir.

In 1982, the marionette has buttons along his top and a black belt. Then two years later, in 1984, he ditched some of his buttons for a bow tie, which would become his iconic look in the years to come. Then in 1985 and 1986, Old Man Gloom had orange hair.

Then the '90s Zozobra rocked yellow locks along with his bow tie. Fast forward to the early 2000s. Old Man Zoom donned several looks. The easiest change to see was his hair, from white to purple to orange. Other than the fact that has gotten bigger, I think the biggest change that we have done was in 2014, we added the decades project, said Moir.

The decades project starts with the 1920s and is a way to highlight each decade as we get closer to Old Man Glooms 100th birthday. He was a snidely whiplash guy with a big mustache. Then we moved on to the '30s. He was old, bald and fat because that was the depression era. Zozobra had a little white hair left on this head and one button on his top.

Then came 2016. The '40s we have the WWII era. That was a really big deal for us. That was really important because we were able to mark the 75th anniversary of the holocaust, said Moir. The marionette was dressed for the occasion with his double-breasted top, a fedora and a black tie.

Part of the decades project is to teach kids about their past, not just Zozobra's past but what happened in New Mexico, what happened in the world, said Moir. That same year, the night before the event, a candlelight vigil was held to pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.

Then in 2017, it was all about honoring the '50s. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and I would like to say he was father knows worst, instead of father knows best, said Moir. Zozobra had red hair to match his red nails.

Then came the '60s. We really rolled out the entire hippie era 3:42 he tried to give the peace sign, but because he is Zozobra he really couldn't do that, said Moir.

2018 was all groovy baby, with staff dressed in tie-dye as Old Man Gloom wore a bolo tie and had silver hair.

Then last year, in 2019, disco was out to play. Coming in at 50 feet, 6 inches tall, it was all about the John Travolta look. Zozobra wore a white suit, gold medallion and blonde hair. His eyes were the memorable avocado green color and his lips were burnt orange. That was the first time his lips have changed color.

2020 2 was slated to take us back to the '80s, but that is on hold until next year. Event organizers want this years focus to be the coronavirus. Zozobra will not wear a mask. Instead this show will honor first responders like our health care workers.

The big question is, what will them marionette look like? His gray hair will take on the look of the virus itself, with orange pingpong balls and red hair scrunchies. His cuff-links will resemble murder hornets and they will be dipped in gold to bring out his formal attire. Last but not least, the buttons on his jacket will be stamped with the year 2020.

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'A villain of the times': The evolution of Zozobra - KOAT New Mexico